blog/tags/english/index.html

   1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
   2           "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
   3 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
   4   <head>
   5     <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Entries Tagged english</title>
   7     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/style.css" />
   8     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/vim.css" />
   9     <link rel="alternate" title="RSS Feed" href="english.rss" type="application/rss+xml" />
  10   </head>
  11   <body>
  12     <div class="title">
  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/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         25th February 2015
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
  32 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
  33 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
  34 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
  35 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
  36 Software</a>, providing a REST api for administrators and members, and
  37 with distribution on the national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.
  38 But only between 12:00 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally
  39 changed, after many years with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago,
  40 we set up a Ogg Theora stream via icecast to allow everyone with
  41 Internet access to check out the channel the rest of the day.  This is
  42 presented on
  43 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
  44 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
  45 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
  46 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
  47 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
  48
  49 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
  50 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
  51 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
  52 with VLC.</p>
  53
  54 <ul>
  55   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
  56   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
  57 </ul>
  58
  59 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
  60 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
  61 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
  62 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
  63 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
  64 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
  65 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
  66
  67 <blockquote><pre>
  68 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
  69  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
  70  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
  71 </pre></blockquote>
  72
  73 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
  74 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
  75 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
  76 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
  77
  78       </div>
  79       <div class="tags">
  80
  81
  82         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>.
  83
  84
  85       </div>
  86     </div>
  87     <div class="padding"></div>
  88
  89     <div class="entry">
  90       <div class="title">
  91         <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>
  92       </div>
  93       <div class="date">
  94         10th February 2015
  95       </div>
  96       <div class="body">
  97         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
  98 that
  99 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
 100 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
 101 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
 102 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
 103 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
 104 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
 105 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
 106 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
 107 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
 108 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
 109 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
 110 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
 111 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
 112 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
 113 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
 114
 115 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
 116 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
 117 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
 118 controversy about these scanners.</p>
 119
 120 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
 121 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
 122 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
 123
 124       </div>
 125       <div class="tags">
 126
 127
 128         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>.
 129
 130
 131       </div>
 132     </div>
 133     <div class="padding"></div>
 134
 135     <div class="entry">
 136       <div class="title">
 137         <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>
 138       </div>
 139       <div class="date">
 140          8th February 2015
 141       </div>
 142       <div class="body">
 143         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
 144 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
 145 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
 146 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
 147 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
 148 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
 149 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
 150 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
 151 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
 152 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
 153 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
 154 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
 155
 156 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
 157 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
 158 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
 159 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
 160
 161 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
 162 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
 163 distribute the TV content.  The
 164 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
 165 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
 166 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
 167 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
 168 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
 169 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
 170 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
 171 following activity, we now have the schedule
 172 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
 173 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
 174 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
 175 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
 176
 177       </div>
 178       <div class="tags">
 179
 180
 181         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>.
 182
 183
 184       </div>
 185     </div>
 186     <div class="padding"></div>
 187
 188     <div class="entry">
 189       <div class="title">
 190         <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>
 191       </div>
 192       <div class="date">
 193         12th January 2015
 194       </div>
 195       <div class="body">
 196         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
 197 Foundation</a> announced a new video
 198 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
 199 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
 200 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
 201 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
 202 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
 203 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
 204
 205 <p>But today I was told that
 206 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
 207 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
 208 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
 209 available in
 210 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
 211 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
 212 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
 213
 214 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
 215 Libreplanet
 216 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
 217 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
 218
 219       </div>
 220       <div class="tags">
 221
 222
 223         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>.
 224
 225
 226       </div>
 227     </div>
 228     <div class="padding"></div>
 229
 230     <div class="entry">
 231       <div class="title">
 232         <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>
 233       </div>
 234       <div class="date">
 235         30th December 2014
 236       </div>
 237       <div class="body">
 238         <p>I am very happy that we in the
 239 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
 240 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
 241 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
 242 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
 243 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
 244 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
 245 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
 246 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
 247 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
 248 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
 249
 250 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
 251 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
 252 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
 253 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
 254 reports in public.</p>
 255
 256       </div>
 257       <div class="tags">
 258
 259
 260         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>.
 261
 262
 263       </div>
 264     </div>
 265     <div class="padding"></div>
 266
 267     <div class="entry">
 268       <div class="title">
 269         <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>
 270       </div>
 271       <div class="date">
 272         19th December 2014
 273       </div>
 274       <div class="body">
 275         <p>So, Sony caved in
 276 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
 277 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
 278 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
 279 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
 280 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
 281 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
 282 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
 283 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
 284 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
 285 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
 286 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
 287 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
 288 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
 289
 290 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
 291 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
 292 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
 293 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
 294
 295 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
 296 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
 297 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
 298 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
 299 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
 300 income. :)</p>
 301
 302       </div>
 303       <div class="tags">
 304
 305
 306         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>.
 307
 308
 309       </div>
 310     </div>
 311     <div class="padding"></div>
 312
 313     <div class="entry">
 314       <div class="title">
 315         <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>
 316       </div>
 317       <div class="date">
 318         22nd November 2014
 319       </div>
 320       <div class="body">
 321         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
 322 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
 323 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
 324 courtesy of
 325 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
 326 Schubert</a> and
 327 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
 328 McVittie</a>.
 329
 330 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
 331 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
 332 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
 333 you upgrade:</p>
 334
 335 <p><blockquote><pre>
 336 Package: systemd-sysv
 337 Pin: release o=Debian
 338 Pin-Priority: -1
 339 </pre></blockquote><p>
 340
 341 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
 342 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
 343 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
 344 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
 345 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
 346
 347 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
 348 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
 349 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
 350 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
 351 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
 352 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
 353
 354 <p><blockquote><pre>
 355 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
 356 </pre></blockquote><p>
 357
 358 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
 359
 360 <p><blockquote><pre>
 361 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
 362 </pre></blockquote><p>
 363
 364 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
 365 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
 366
 367 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
 368 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
 369 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
 370 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
 371 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
 372 Jessie is released.</p>
 373
 374 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
 375 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
 376 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
 377 line.</p>
 378
 379       </div>
 380       <div class="tags">
 381
 382
 383         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>.
 384
 385
 386       </div>
 387     </div>
 388     <div class="padding"></div>
 389
 390     <div class="entry">
 391       <div class="title">
 392         <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>
 393       </div>
 394       <div class="date">
 395         10th November 2014
 396       </div>
 397       <div class="body">
 398         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
 399 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
 400 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
 401
 402 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
 403 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
 404 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
 405 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
 406 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
 407 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
 408 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
 409 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
 410 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
 411 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
 412 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
 413 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
 414 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
 415 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
 416 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
 417
 418 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
 419 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
 420 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
 421 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
 422 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
 423 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
 424 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
 425 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
 426 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
 427 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
 428 were fairly easy, and
 429 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
 430 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
 431 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
 432 useful approach.</p>
 433
 434 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
 435 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
 436 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
 437 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
 438 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
 439 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
 440 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
 441 this:</p>
 442
 443 <p><blockquote><pre>
 444 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
 445   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
 446 </pre></blockquote></p>
 447
 448 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
 449 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
 450
 451 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
 452 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
 453 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
 454 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
 455 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
 456 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
 457 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
 458 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
 459 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
 460 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
 461 system.</p>
 462
 463 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
 464 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
 465 SMTorP. :)</p>
 466
 467       </div>
 468       <div class="tags">
 469
 470
 471         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>.
 472
 473
 474       </div>
 475     </div>
 476     <div class="padding"></div>
 477
 478     <div class="entry">
 479       <div class="title">
 480         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
 481       </div>
 482       <div class="date">
 483         27th October 2014
 484       </div>
 485       <div class="body">
 486         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
 487 sent out
 488 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
 489 announcement</a>:</p>
 490
 491 <pre>
 492 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
 493 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
 494
 495 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
 496 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
 497 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
 498 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
 499 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
 500 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
 501 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
 502
 503 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
 504 installation instructions are available, including detailed
 505 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
 506 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
 507 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
 508 of at least 5 characters!
 509
 510  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
 511
 512 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
 513 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
 514 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
 515 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
 516 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
 517
 518 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
 519 mostly in Germany and Norway.
 520
 521 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
 522 ===============================
 523
 524 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
 525 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
 526 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
 527 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
 528 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
 529 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
 530 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
 531 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
 532 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
 533 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
 534 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
 535 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
 536 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
 537 environment.
 538
 539  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
 540  [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;
 541
 542 Full release notes and manual
 543 =============================
 544
 545 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
 546 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
 547 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
 548 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
 549 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
 550
 551  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
 552  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
 553
 554 Where to get it
 555 ---------------
 556
 557 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
 558
 559  * <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>
 560  * <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>
 561  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
 562
 563 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
 564
 565 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
 566 ===============================================================================
 567
 568
 569 Installation changes
 570 --------------------
 571
 572  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
 573
 574 Software updates
 575 ----------------
 576
 577 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
 578
 579  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
 580  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
 581    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
 582    choose one of the others see manual.)
 583  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
 584  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
 585  * GOsa 2.7.4
 586  * LTSP 5.5.4
 587  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 588  * new boot framework: systemd
 589  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
 590  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 591  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 592  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
 593  * golearn 0.9
 594  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 595  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 596  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
 597    installation.
 598  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
 599    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
 600
 601  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
 602  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
 603
 604 Fixed bugs
 605 ----------
 606
 607  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
 608    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
 609    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
 610  * and many others.
 611
 612 Documentation and translation updates
 613 -------------------------------------
 614
 615  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
 616    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
 617    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
 618
 619 Other changes
 620 -------------
 621
 622  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
 623    server takes more time.
 624  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
 625    doesn't work.
 626
 627 Regressions / known problems
 628 ----------------------------
 629
 630  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
 631    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
 632    and Debian bug #762103).
 633  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
 634    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
 635  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
 636    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
 637    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
 638
 639 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
 640
 641  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
 642
 643 How to report bugs
 644 ------------------
 645
 646 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
 647
 648 About Debian
 649 ============
 650
 651 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
 652 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
 653 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
 654 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
 655 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
 656 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
 657 operating system.
 658
 659 Contact Information
 660 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
 661 mail to press@debian.org.
 662
 663  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
 664 </pre>
 665
 666       </div>
 667       <div class="tags">
 668
 669
 670         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>.
 671
 672
 673       </div>
 674     </div>
 675     <div class="padding"></div>
 676
 677     <div class="entry">
 678       <div class="title">
 679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
 680       </div>
 681       <div class="date">
 682         23rd October 2014
 683       </div>
 684       <div class="body">
 685         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
 686 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
 687 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
 688 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
 689 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
 690 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
 691 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
 692 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
 693 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
 694 live.</p>
 695
 696 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
 697 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
 698 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
 699 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
 700 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
 701 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
 702 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
 703 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
 704
 705       </div>
 706       <div class="tags">
 707
 708
 709         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>.
 710
 711
 712       </div>
 713     </div>
 714     <div class="padding"></div>
 715
 716     <div class="entry">
 717       <div class="title">
 718         <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>
 719       </div>
 720       <div class="date">
 721         22nd October 2014
 722       </div>
 723       <div class="body">
 724         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
 725 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
 726 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
 727 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
 728 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
 729 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
 730 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
 731 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
 732 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
 733 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
 734 lists I recently took over:</p>
 735
 736 <p><blockquote><pre>
 737 % time listadmin xiph
 738 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
 739 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
 740
 741 real    0m1.709s
 742 user    0m0.232s
 743 sys     0m0.012s
 744 %
 745 </pre></blockquote></p>
 746
 747 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
 748 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
 749 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
 750 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
 751 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
 752 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
 753 program.</p>
 754
 755 <p>If you install
 756 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
 757 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
 758 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
 759
 760 <p><blockquote><pre>
 761 username username@example.org
 762 spamlevel 23
 763 default discard
 764 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
 765
 766 password secret
 767 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
 768 mailman-list@lists.example.com
 769
 770 password hidden
 771 other-list@otherserver.example.org
 772 </pre></blockquote></p>
 773
 774 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
 775 learn the details.</p>
 776
 777 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
 778 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
 779 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
 780 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
 781
 782 <p><blockquote><pre>
 783 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
 784 </pre></blockquote></p>
 785
 786 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
 787 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
 788 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
 789 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
 790 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
 791 email.</p>
 792
 793 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
 794 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
 795 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
 796 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
 797 software.</p>
 798
 799 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 800 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 801 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 802
 803 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
 804 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
 805 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
 806 sure why.</p>
 807
 808       </div>
 809       <div class="tags">
 810
 811
 812         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>.
 813
 814
 815       </div>
 816     </div>
 817     <div class="padding"></div>
 818
 819     <div class="entry">
 820       <div class="title">
 821         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
 822       </div>
 823       <div class="date">
 824         17th October 2014
 825       </div>
 826       <div class="body">
 827         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
 828 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
 829 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
 830 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
 831 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
 832 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
 833 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
 834
 835 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
 836 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
 837 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
 838 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
 839 of this story.)</p>
 840
 841 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
 842 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
 843 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
 844 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
 845 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
 846 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
 847 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
 848 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
 849 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
 850 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
 851
 852 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
 853 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
 854 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
 855 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
 856
 857 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
 858 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
 859
 860 <p><blockquote><pre>
 861 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
 862 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
 863 </pre></blockquote></p>
 864
 865 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
 866 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
 867 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
 868 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
 869 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
 870 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
 871 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
 872 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
 873
 874 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
 875 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
 876
 877 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
 878 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
 879 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
 880 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
 881 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
 882
 883 <p><blockquote><pre>
 884 Task: isenkram-packages
 885 Section: hardware
 886 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 887  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
 888  proposed.
 889 Test-new-install: show show
 890 Relevance: 8
 891 Packages: for-current-hardware
 892
 893 Task: isenkram-firmware
 894 Section: hardware
 895 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 896  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
 897  packages are proposed.
 898 Test-new-install: mark show
 899 Relevance: 8
 900 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
 901 </pre></blockquote></p>
 902
 903 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
 904 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
 905 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
 906 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
 907 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
 908
 909 <p><blockquote><pre>
 910 #!/bin/sh
 911 #
 912 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
 913 export PATH
 914 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
 915 </pre></blockquote></p>
 916
 917 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
 918 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
 919
 920 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
 921 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
 922 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
 923 install.</p>
 924
 925 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
 926 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
 927 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
 928
 929       </div>
 930       <div class="tags">
 931
 932
 933         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>.
 934
 935
 936       </div>
 937     </div>
 938     <div class="padding"></div>
 939
 940     <div class="entry">
 941       <div class="title">
 942         <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>
 943       </div>
 944       <div class="date">
 945          4th October 2014
 946       </div>
 947       <div class="body">
 948         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
 949 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
 950 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
 951 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
 952
 953 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
 954
 955 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
 956 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
 957 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
 958
 959       </div>
 960       <div class="tags">
 961
 962
 963         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>.
 964
 965
 966       </div>
 967     </div>
 968     <div class="padding"></div>
 969
 970     <div class="entry">
 971       <div class="title">
 972         <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>
 973       </div>
 974       <div class="date">
 975          4th October 2014
 976       </div>
 977       <div class="body">
 978         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
 979 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
 980 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
 981 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
 982 Dibb.</p>
 983
 984 <p>I just wrapped up
 985 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
 986 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
 987 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
 988 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
 989 0.17.</p>
 990
 991 <ul>
 992
 993  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
 994  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
 995    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
 996  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
 997  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
 998  <li>Fix include orders</li>
 999  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
1000  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
1001  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
1002    the palette size is the same.</li>
1003  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
1004  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
1005  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
1006  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
1007    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
1008
1009 </ul>
1010
1011 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
1012 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
1013 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
1014
1015       </div>
1016       <div class="tags">
1017
1018
1019         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>.
1020
1021
1022       </div>
1023     </div>
1024     <div class="padding"></div>
1025
1026     <div class="entry">
1027       <div class="title">
1028         <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>
1029       </div>
1030       <div class="date">
1031         26th September 2014
1032       </div>
1033       <div class="body">
1034         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1035 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
1036 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
1037 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
1038 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
1039 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
1040 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
1041 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
1042 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
1043 future.  The
1044 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
1045 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
1046 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
1047 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
1048 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
1049
1050 <p>First, download the test ISO via
1051 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
1052 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
1053 or rsync (use
1054 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
1055 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
1056 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
1057 install with some tweaking.</p>
1058
1059 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
1060 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
1061
1062 <p><blockquote><pre>
1063 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
1064 </pre></blockquote></p>
1065
1066 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
1067 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
1068 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
1069 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
1070
1071 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
1072 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
1073 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
1074 your need.</p>
1075
1076 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
1077 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
1078 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
1079 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
1080 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
1081 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
1082 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
1083 days.</p>
1084
1085 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
1086 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
1087 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
1088 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
1089 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
1090 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
1091 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
1092 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
1093 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
1094
1095 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
1096 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
1097 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
1098
1099       </div>
1100       <div class="tags">
1101
1102
1103         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>.
1104
1105
1106       </div>
1107     </div>
1108     <div class="padding"></div>
1109
1110     <div class="entry">
1111       <div class="title">
1112         <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>
1113       </div>
1114       <div class="date">
1115         25th September 2014
1116       </div>
1117       <div class="body">
1118         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
1119 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
1120 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
1121 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
1122 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
1123 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
1124 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
1125 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
1126 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
1127 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
1128 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
1129 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
1130 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
1131
1132 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
1133 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
1134 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
1135 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
1136 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
1137 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
1138 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
1139 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
1140 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
1141 list</a>. :)</p>
1142
1143       </div>
1144       <div class="tags">
1145
1146
1147         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>.
1148
1149
1150       </div>
1151     </div>
1152     <div class="padding"></div>
1153
1154     <div class="entry">
1155       <div class="title">
1156         <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>
1157       </div>
1158       <div class="date">
1159         16th September 2014
1160       </div>
1161       <div class="body">
1162         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
1163 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
1164 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
1165 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
1166 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
1167 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
1168 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
1169 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
1170 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
1171 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
1172 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
1173 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
1174 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
1175 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
1176
1177 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
1178 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
1179 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
1180 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
1181 depend on the small and clever package
1182 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
1183 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
1184 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
1185 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
1186 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
1187 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
1188 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
1189 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
1190 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
1191 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
1192 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
1193
1194 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
1195 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
1196 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
1197 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
1198 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
1199 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
1200 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
1201 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
1202 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
1203 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
1204 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
1205 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
1206 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
1207 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
1208 dialog.</p>
1209
1210 <p><table>
1211
1212 <tr>
1213 <th>Machine/setup</th>
1214 <th>Original tasksel</th>
1215 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
1216 <th>Reduction</th>
1217 </tr>
1218
1219 <tr>
1220 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
1221 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
1222 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
1223 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
1224 </tr>
1225
1226 <tr>
1227 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
1228 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
1229 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
1230 <td>23 min 40%</td>
1231 </tr>
1232
1233 <tr>
1234 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
1235 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
1236 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
1237 <td>11 min 50%</td>
1238 </tr>
1239
1240 <tr>
1241 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
1242 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
1243 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
1244 <td>2 min 33%</td>
1245 </tr>
1246
1247 <tr>
1248 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
1249 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
1250 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
1251 <td>4 min 21%</td>
1252 </tr>
1253
1254 </table></p>
1255
1256 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
1257 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
1258 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
1259 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
1260 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
1261 installed.</p>
1262
1263 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
1264 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
1265 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
1266 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
1267 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
1268 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
1269 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
1270 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
1271 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
1272 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
1273 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
1274 for the entire installation.</p>
1275
1276 <p>I've implemented this in the
1277 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
1278 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
1279 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
1280 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
1281 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
1282
1283 <p><blockquote><pre>
1284 #!/bin/sh
1285 set -e
1286 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
1287 info() {
1288     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
1289 }
1290 error() {
1291     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
1292 }
1293 override_install() {
1294     apt-install eatmydata || true
1295     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
1296         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
1297             file=/usr/bin/$bin
1298             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
1299             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
1300                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
1301                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
1302                     > /target$file.edu
1303                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
1304                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
1305                     --rename --quiet --add $file
1306                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
1307             else
1308                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
1309             fi
1310         done
1311     else
1312         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
1313     fi
1314 }
1315
1316 override_install
1317 </pre></blockquote></p>
1318
1319 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
1320 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
1321
1322 <p><blockquote><pre>
1323 #! /bin/sh -e
1324 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
1325 error() {
1326     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
1327 }
1328 remove_install_override() {
1329     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
1330         file=/usr/bin/$bin
1331         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
1332             rm /target$file
1333             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
1334                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
1335             rm /target$file.edu
1336         else
1337             error "Missing divert for $file."
1338         fi
1339     done
1340     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
1341 }
1342
1343 remove_install_override
1344 </pre></blockquote></p>
1345
1346 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
1347 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
1348 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
1349
1350 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
1351 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
1352 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
1353 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
1354 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
1355 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
1356 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
1357 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
1358 everyone.</p>
1359
1360 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
1361 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
1362 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
1363 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
1364
1365 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
1366 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
1367 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
1368 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
1369 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
1370
1371 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
1372 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
1373 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
1374 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
1375 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
1376
1377       </div>
1378       <div class="tags">
1379
1380
1381         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>.
1382
1383
1384       </div>
1385     </div>
1386     <div class="padding"></div>
1387
1388     <div class="entry">
1389       <div class="title">
1390         <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>
1391       </div>
1392       <div class="date">
1393         10th September 2014
1394       </div>
1395       <div class="body">
1396         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
1397 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
1398 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
1399 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
1400 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
1401 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
1402 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
1403 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
1404 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
1405 those problems are gone now.</p>
1406
1407 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
1408 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
1409 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
1410 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
1411 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
1412
1413 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
1414 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
1415 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
1416
1417 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
1418 line:</p>
1419
1420 <p><blockquote><pre>
1421 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
1422 </pre></blockquote></p>
1423
1424 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
1425 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
1426 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
1427 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
1428
1429 <p><blockquote><pre>
1430 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
1431 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
1432 %
1433 </pre></blockquote></p>
1434
1435 <p>Now if only
1436 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
1437 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
1438 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
1439 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
1440 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
1441 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
1442 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
1443 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
1444 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
1445
1446       </div>
1447       <div class="tags">
1448
1449
1450         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>.
1451
1452
1453       </div>
1454     </div>
1455     <div class="padding"></div>
1456
1457     <div class="entry">
1458       <div class="title">
1459         <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>
1460       </div>
1461       <div class="date">
1462         25th August 2014
1463       </div>
1464       <div class="body">
1465         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
1466 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
1467 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
1468 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
1469 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
1470 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
1471 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
1472 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
1473 am not sure.
1474 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
1475 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
1476 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
1477 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
1478 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
1479 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
1480 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
1481 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
1482 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
1483 licenses are.</p>
1484
1485 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
1486 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
1487 end user</a>
1488 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
1489 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
1490
1491 <p><blockquote>
1492 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
1493 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
1494
1495 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
1496 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
1497 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
1498 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
1499 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
1500 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
1501 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
1502 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
1503 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
1504 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
1505 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
1506 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
1507 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
1508 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
1509 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
1510 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
1511 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
1512 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
1513
1514 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
1515 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
1516
1517 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
1518 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
1519 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
1520 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
1521 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
1522 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
1523 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
1524 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
1525 </blockquote></p>
1526
1527 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
1528 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
1529
1530 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
1531 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
1532
1533 <p><blockquote>
1534
1535 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
1536 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
1537 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
1538 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
1539 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
1540 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
1541 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
1542 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
1543 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
1544 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
1545 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
1546 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
1547
1548 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
1549 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
1550 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
1551 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
1552 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
1553 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
1554 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
1555 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
1556 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
1557 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
1558 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
1559 additional details.</p>
1560
1561 </blockquote></p>
1562
1563 <p>Some free software like
1564 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
1565 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
1566 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
1567 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
1568
1569       </div>
1570       <div class="tags">
1571
1572
1573         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/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>.
1574
1575
1576       </div>
1577     </div>
1578     <div class="padding"></div>
1579
1580     <div class="entry">
1581       <div class="title">
1582         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
1583       </div>
1584       <div class="date">
1585         31st July 2014
1586       </div>
1587       <div class="body">
1588         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
1589 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
1590 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
1591 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
1592 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
1593 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
1594
1595 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
1596
1597 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
1598 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
1599 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
1600 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
1601 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
1602 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
1603 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
1604 works with Windows . :-(</p>
1605
1606 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
1607 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
1608 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
1609 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
1610 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
1611 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
1612
1613 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
1614 project?</strong></p>
1615
1616 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
1617 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
1618 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
1619 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
1620 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
1621 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
1622 with this job.</p>
1623
1624 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1625 Edu?</strong></p>
1626
1627 <p>The independence.</p>
1628
1629 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
1630 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
1631 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
1632
1633 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
1634 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
1635 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
1636 working reliable. </p>
1637
1638 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
1639 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
1640 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
1641 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
1642 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
1643 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
1644 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
1645 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
1646
1647 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1648 Edu?</strong></p>
1649
1650 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
1651 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
1652 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
1653
1654 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
1655
1656 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
1657 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
1658
1659 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1660 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
1661
1662 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
1663 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
1664 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
1665 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
1666 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
1667 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
1668 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
1669
1670       </div>
1671       <div class="tags">
1672
1673
1674         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>.
1675
1676
1677       </div>
1678     </div>
1679     <div class="padding"></div>
1680
1681     <div class="entry">
1682       <div class="title">
1683         <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>
1684       </div>
1685       <div class="date">
1686         23rd July 2014
1687       </div>
1688       <div class="body">
1689         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
1690 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
1691 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
1692 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
1693 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
1694 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
1695 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
1696 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
1697 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
1698 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
1699 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
1700 the translation show this very well:</p>
1701
1702 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
1703
1704 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
1705 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
1706 project pages and the
1707 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
1708 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
1709 and HTML version available in the
1710 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
1711 directory</a>.</p>
1712
1713 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
1714 you find any.</p>
1715
1716       </div>
1717       <div class="tags">
1718
1719
1720         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>.
1721
1722
1723       </div>
1724     </div>
1725     <div class="padding"></div>
1726
1727     <div class="entry">
1728       <div class="title">
1729         <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>
1730       </div>
1731       <div class="date">
1732         17th June 2014
1733       </div>
1734       <div class="body">
1735         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1736 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
1737 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
1738 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
1739 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
1740
1741 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
1742 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
1743 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
1744 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
1745 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
1746 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
1747 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
1748 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
1749 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
1750 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
1751 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
1752 goals.</p>
1753
1754 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
1755 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
1756 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
1757 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
1758 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
1759 chapters together into one large web page (aka
1760 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
1761 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
1762 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
1763 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
1764 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
1765 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
1766 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
1767 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
1768 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
1769 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
1770 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
1771 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
1772 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
1773 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
1774 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
1775 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
1776 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
1777 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
1778
1779 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
1780 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
1781 track the English original.  For this we use the
1782 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
1783 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
1784 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
1785 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
1786 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
1787 files), which the translations update with the native language
1788 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
1789 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
1790 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
1791 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
1792 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
1793 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
1794 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
1795 of the documentation.</p>
1796
1797 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
1798 recommend using
1799 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
1800 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
1801 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
1802 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
1803 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
1804 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
1805 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
1806 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
1807
1808 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
1809 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
1810 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
1811 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
1812 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
1813 translated images by storing translated versions in
1814 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
1815 package maintainers know more.</p>
1816
1817 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
1818 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
1819 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
1820 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
1821 PDF version</a> or the
1822 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
1823 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
1824 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
1825
1826 <p>To learn more, check out
1827 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
1828 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
1829 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
1830 manual on the wiki</a> and
1831 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
1832 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
1833
1834       </div>
1835       <div class="tags">
1836
1837
1838         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>.
1839
1840
1841       </div>
1842     </div>
1843     <div class="padding"></div>
1844
1845     <div class="entry">
1846       <div class="title">
1847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
1848       </div>
1849       <div class="date">
1850         29th May 2014
1851       </div>
1852       <div class="body">
1853         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
1854 in my car, connected to
1855 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
1856 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
1857 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
1858 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
1859 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
1860 such car computer.</p>
1861
1862 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
1863
1864 <ul>
1865
1866  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
1867
1868  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
1869    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
1870    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
1871    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
1872    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
1873
1874  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
1875    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
1876    route.</li>
1877
1878  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
1879
1880  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
1881    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
1882    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
1883    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
1884    connection do not work.</li>
1885
1886  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
1887    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
1888
1889  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
1890    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
1891
1892  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
1893    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
1894
1895 </ul>
1896
1897 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
1898 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
1899
1900       </div>
1901       <div class="tags">
1902
1903
1904         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1905
1906
1907       </div>
1908     </div>
1909     <div class="padding"></div>
1910
1911     <div class="entry">
1912       <div class="title">
1913         <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>
1914       </div>
1915       <div class="date">
1916         29th April 2014
1917       </div>
1918       <div class="body">
1919         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
1920 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
1921 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
1922 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
1923 newer AVM2 format - see
1924 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
1925 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
1926 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
1927 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
1928 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
1929 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
1930 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
1931 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
1932 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
1933 sites do not work yet.</p>
1934
1935 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
1936 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
1937 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
1938 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
1939 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
1940 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
1941 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
1942 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
1943 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
1944 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
1945 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
1946
1947 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
1948 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
1949 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
1950 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
1951 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
1952 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
1953 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
1954
1955 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
1956 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
1957 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
1958 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
1959 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
1960
1961       </div>
1962       <div class="tags">
1963
1964
1965         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>.
1966
1967
1968       </div>
1969     </div>
1970     <div class="padding"></div>
1971
1972     <div class="entry">
1973       <div class="title">
1974         <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>
1975       </div>
1976       <div class="date">
1977         23rd April 2014
1978       </div>
1979       <div class="body">
1980         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
1981 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
1982 So I implemented one, using
1983 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
1984 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
1985 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
1986 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
1987 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
1988 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
1989
1990 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
1991 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
1992 packages to install.  The first part is in
1993 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
1994 this:</p>
1995
1996 <p><blockquote><pre>
1997 Task: isenkram
1998 Section: hardware
1999 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
2000  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
2001  proposed.
2002 Test-new-install: mark show
2003 Relevance: 8
2004 Packages: for-current-hardware
2005 </pre></blockquote></p>
2006
2007 <p>The second part is in
2008 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
2009 this:</p>
2010
2011 <p><blockquote><pre>
2012 #!/bin/sh
2013 #
2014 (
2015     isenkram-lookup
2016     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2017 ) | sort -u
2018 </pre></blockquote></p>
2019
2020 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
2021 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
2022 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
2023 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
2024 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
2025 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
2026
2027 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
2028 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
2029 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
2030 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
2031 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
2032 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
2033 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
2034 the python-apt code (bug
2035 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
2036 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
2037 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
2038 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
2039 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
2040 unstable today.</p>
2041
2042 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
2043 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
2044 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
2045 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
2046 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
2047 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
2048 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
2049 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
2050 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
2051
2052 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
2053 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
2054 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
2055 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
2056 package.  See also
2057 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
2058 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
2059 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
2060 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
2061
2062       </div>
2063       <div class="tags">
2064
2065
2066         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>.
2067
2068
2069       </div>
2070     </div>
2071     <div class="padding"></div>
2072
2073     <div class="entry">
2074       <div class="title">
2075         <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>
2076       </div>
2077       <div class="date">
2078         15th April 2014
2079       </div>
2080       <div class="body">
2081         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
2082 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
2083 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
2084 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
2085 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
2086 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
2087
2088 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
2089 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
2090 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
2091 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
2092 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
2093 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
2094 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
2095
2096 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
2097 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
2098 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
2099 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
2100 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
2101 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
2102 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
2103 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
2104 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
2105 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
2106 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
2107 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
2108
2109 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
2110 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
2111 become root:</p>
2112
2113 <p><pre>
2114 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
2115   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
2116   u-boot-tools
2117 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
2118   freedom-maker
2119 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
2120 </pre></p>
2121
2122 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
2123 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
2124 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
2125 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
2126 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
2127 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
2128 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
2129 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
2130
2131 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
2132 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
2133 the preseed values:</p>
2134
2135 <p><pre>
2136 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
2137 </pre></p>
2138
2139 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
2140 it still work.</p>
2141
2142 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
2143 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
2144 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
2145 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
2146 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
2147 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
2148 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
2149
2150 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
2151 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
2152 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
2153 irc.debian.org)</a> and
2154 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2155 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2156
2157       </div>
2158       <div class="tags">
2159
2160
2161         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>.
2162
2163
2164       </div>
2165     </div>
2166     <div class="padding"></div>
2167
2168     <div class="entry">
2169       <div class="title">
2170         <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>
2171       </div>
2172       <div class="date">
2173          9th April 2014
2174       </div>
2175       <div class="body">
2176         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
2177 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
2178 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
2179 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
2180 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
2181 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
2182 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
2183 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
2184 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
2185 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
2186 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
2187 have looked at a system called
2188 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
2189 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
2190
2191 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
2192 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
2193 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
2194 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
2195 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
2196 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
2197 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
2198 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
2199 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
2200 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
2201 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
2202 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
2203 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
2204
2205 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
2206 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
2207 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
2208 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
2209 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
2210 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
2211 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
2212 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
2213 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
2214 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
2215 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
2216 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
2217 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
2218 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
2219 account.</p>
2220
2221 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
2222 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
2223 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
2224 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
2225 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
2226 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
2227 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
2228
2229 <p><blockquote><pre>
2230 [s3c]
2231 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2232 backend-login: API-login
2233 backend-password: API-password
2234 fs-passphrase: local-password
2235 </pre></blockquote></p>
2236
2237 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
2238 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
2239 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
2240 details and password to create it:</p>
2241
2242 <p><blockquote><pre>
2243 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
2244 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2245   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2246 Enter backend login:
2247 Enter backend password:
2248 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
2249 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
2250 Enter encryption password:
2251 Confirm encryption password:
2252 Generating random encryption key...
2253 Creating metadata tables...
2254 Dumping metadata...
2255 ..objects..
2256 ..blocks..
2257 ..inodes..
2258 ..inode_blocks..
2259 ..symlink_targets..
2260 ..names..
2261 ..contents..
2262 ..ext_attributes..
2263 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2264 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
2265 # </pre></blockquote></p>
2266
2267 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
2268
2269 <p><blockquote><pre>
2270 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2271   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2272 Using 4 upload threads.
2273 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
2274 Reading metadata...
2275 ..objects..
2276 ..blocks..
2277 ..inodes..
2278 ..inode_blocks..
2279 ..symlink_targets..
2280 ..names..
2281 ..contents..
2282 ..ext_attributes..
2283 Mounting filesystem...
2284 # df -h /s3ql
2285 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
2286 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
2287 #
2288 </pre></blockquote></p>
2289
2290 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
2291 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
2292 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
2293 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
2294 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
2295 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
2296
2297 <p><blockquote><pre>
2298 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
2299 #
2300 </pre></blockquote></p>
2301
2302 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
2303 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
2304 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
2305 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
2306 file system:</p>
2307
2308 <p><blockquote><pre>
2309 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2310 Using cached metadata.
2311 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
2312 Checking DB integrity...
2313 Creating temporary extra indices...
2314 Checking lost+found...
2315 Checking cached objects...
2316 Checking names (refcounts)...
2317 Checking contents (names)...
2318 Checking contents (inodes)...
2319 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
2320 Checking objects (reference counts)...
2321 Checking objects (backend)...
2322 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
2323 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
2324 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
2325 Checking objects (sizes)...
2326 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
2327 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
2328 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
2329 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
2330 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
2331 Checking inodes (sizes)...
2332 Checking extended attributes (names)...
2333 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
2334 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
2335 Checking directory reachability...
2336 Checking unix conventions...
2337 Checking referential integrity...
2338 Dropping temporary indices...
2339 Backing up old metadata...
2340 Dumping metadata...
2341 ..objects..
2342 ..blocks..
2343 ..inodes..
2344 ..inode_blocks..
2345 ..symlink_targets..
2346 ..names..
2347 ..contents..
2348 ..ext_attributes..
2349 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2350 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
2351 #
2352 </pre></blockquote></p>
2353
2354 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
2355 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
2356 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
2357 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
2358 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
2359 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
2360 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
2361 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
2362 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
2363 working set.</p>
2364
2365 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
2366 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
2367 busy:</p>
2368
2369 <p><blockquote><pre>
2370 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2371   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2372 Using 8 upload threads.
2373 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
2374 #
2375 </pre></blockquote></p>
2376
2377 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
2378 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
2379 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
2380 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
2381 s3qlctrl:
2382
2383 <p><blockquote><pre>
2384 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
2385 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
2386 #
2387 </pre></blockquote></p>
2388
2389 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
2390 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
2391 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
2392 a report:</p>
2393
2394 <p><blockquote><pre>
2395 # s3qlstat /s3ql
2396 Directory entries:    9141
2397 Inodes:               9143
2398 Data blocks:          8851
2399 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
2400 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
2401 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
2402 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
2403 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
2404 #
2405 </pre></blockquote></p>
2406
2407 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
2408 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
2409 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
2410 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
2411 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
2412 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
2413 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
2414 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
2415 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
2416 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
2417 best.</p>
2418
2419 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
2420 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
2421 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
2422 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
2423 poster is titled
2424 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
2425 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
2426 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
2427 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
2428 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
2429
2430 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
2431 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
2432 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
2433 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
2434 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
2435 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
2436 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
2437 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
2438
2439 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
2440 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
2441 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
2442 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
2443 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
2444 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
2445 only read from it.</p>
2446
2447 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2448 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2449 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2450
2451       </div>
2452       <div class="tags">
2453
2454
2455         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>.
2456
2457
2458       </div>
2459     </div>
2460     <div class="padding"></div>
2461
2462     <div class="entry">
2463       <div class="title">
2464         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
2465       </div>
2466       <div class="date">
2467          1st April 2014
2468       </div>
2469       <div class="body">
2470         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
2471 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
2472 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
2473 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
2474 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
2475 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
2476 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
2477 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
2478 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
2479 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
2480 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
2481 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
2482 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
2483
2484 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
2485 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
2486 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
2487 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
2488 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
2489 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
2490 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
2491 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
2492 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
2493 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
2494 Linux.</p>
2495
2496 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
2497 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
2498 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
2499 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
2500 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
2501 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
2502 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
2503 Windows before metro).</p>
2504
2505 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
2506 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
2507 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
2508 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
2509 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
2510 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
2511 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
2512 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
2513 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
2514 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
2515 old Windows binaries, check it out by
2516 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
2517 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
2518 image.</p>
2519
2520       </div>
2521       <div class="tags">
2522
2523
2524         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
2525
2526
2527       </div>
2528     </div>
2529     <div class="padding"></div>
2530
2531     <div class="entry">
2532       <div class="title">
2533         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
2534       </div>
2535       <div class="date">
2536         30th March 2014
2537       </div>
2538       <div class="body">
2539         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
2540 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
2541 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
2542 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
2543 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
2544
2545 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2546
2547 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
2548 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
2549 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
2550 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
2551 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
2552
2553 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
2554 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
2555 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
2556
2557 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
2558 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
2559 hunger.</p>
2560
2561 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2562 project?</strong></p>
2563
2564 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
2565 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
2566 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
2567 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
2568 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
2569 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
2570 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
2571 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
2572 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
2573 running.  I just loved it.</p>
2574
2575 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2576 Edu?</strong></p>
2577
2578 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
2579 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
2580 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
2581 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
2582 be made of steel.</p>
2583
2584 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2585 Edu?</strong></p>
2586
2587 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
2588
2589 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
2590 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
2591 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
2592 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
2593 or dropped.</p>
2594
2595 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
2596 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
2597 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
2598 discourage many people too.</p>
2599
2600 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2601
2602 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
2603 Virtualbox.</p>
2604
2605
2606 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2607 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2608
2609 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
2610 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
2611 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
2612 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
2613 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
2614 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
2615 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
2616 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
2617 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
2618
2619       </div>
2620       <div class="tags">
2621
2622
2623         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>.
2624
2625
2626       </div>
2627     </div>
2628     <div class="padding"></div>
2629
2630     <div class="entry">
2631       <div class="title">
2632         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
2633       </div>
2634       <div class="date">
2635         25th March 2014
2636       </div>
2637       <div class="body">
2638         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
2639 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
2640 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
2641 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
2642 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
2643 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
2644 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
2645 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
2646 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
2647
2648 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
2649 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
2650 looked a given way.  Such
2651 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
2652 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
2653 called a
2654 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
2655 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
2656 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
2657 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
2658 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
2659 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
2660 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
2661 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
2662 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
2663 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
2664 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
2665 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
2666 There are several commercial services around providing such
2667 timestamping.  A quick search for
2668 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
2669 service</a>" pointed me to at least
2670 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
2671 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
2672 Vadis</a>,
2673 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
2674 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
2675 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
2676 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
2677
2678 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
2679 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
2680 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
2681 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
2682 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
2683 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
2684 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
2685 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
2686 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
2687 Greifswald.</p>
2688
2689 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
2690 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
2691 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
2692 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
2693 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
2694
2695 <p><blockquote><pre>
2696 #!/bin/sh
2697 set -e
2698 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
2699 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
2700 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
2701 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
2702 cafile=chain.txt
2703 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
2704     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
2705 fi
2706 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
2707     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
2708 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
2709 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
2710 base64 < "$resfile"
2711 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
2712 </pre></blockquote></p>
2713
2714 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
2715 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
2716 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
2717 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
2718 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
2719 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
2720 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
2721 changed.</p>
2722
2723 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
2724 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
2725 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
2726 to set up?</p>
2727
2728       </div>
2729       <div class="tags">
2730
2731
2732         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>.
2733
2734
2735       </div>
2736     </div>
2737     <div class="padding"></div>
2738
2739     <div class="entry">
2740       <div class="title">
2741         <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>
2742       </div>
2743       <div class="date">
2744         21st March 2014
2745       </div>
2746       <div class="body">
2747         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
2748 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
2749 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
2750 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
2751 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
2752 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
2753 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
2754
2755 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
2756 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
2757 tried using
2758 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
2759 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
2760 and program
2761 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
2762 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
2763 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
2764 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
2765 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
2766 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
2767 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
2768 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
2769 this method.</p>
2770
2771 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
2772 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
2773 problem is
2774 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
2775 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
2776 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
2777 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
2778 DVD structures, as the python library
2779 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
2780 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
2781 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
2782 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
2783 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
2784 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
2785
2786 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
2787 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
2788
2789       </div>
2790       <div class="tags">
2791
2792
2793         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/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2794
2795
2796       </div>
2797     </div>
2798     <div class="padding"></div>
2799
2800     <div class="entry">
2801       <div class="title">
2802         <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>
2803       </div>
2804       <div class="date">
2805         14th March 2014
2806       </div>
2807       <div class="body">
2808         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
2809 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
2810 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
2811 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
2812 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
2813 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
2814 release (0.2).</p>
2815
2816 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
2817 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
2818 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
2819 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
2820 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
2821 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
2822 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
2823 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
2824 and build using
2825 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
2826 with a user with sudo access to become root:
2827
2828 <pre>
2829 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
2830   freedom-maker
2831 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
2832   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
2833   u-boot-tools
2834 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
2835 </pre>
2836
2837 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
2838 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
2839 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
2840 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
2841 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
2842 kpartx call.</p>
2843
2844 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
2845 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
2846 the preseed values:</p>
2847
2848 <pre>
2849 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
2850 </pre>
2851
2852 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
2853 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
2854 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
2855 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
2856 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
2857 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
2858
2859 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
2860 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
2861 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
2862 irc.debian.org)</a> and
2863 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2864 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2865
2866       </div>
2867       <div class="tags">
2868
2869
2870         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>.
2871
2872
2873       </div>
2874     </div>
2875     <div class="padding"></div>
2876
2877     <div class="entry">
2878       <div class="title">
2879         <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>
2880       </div>
2881       <div class="date">
2882         12th March 2014
2883       </div>
2884       <div class="body">
2885         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
2886 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
2887 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
2888 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
2889 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
2890 document this better when one of the customers of
2891 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
2892 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
2893 get this working are the following:</p>
2894
2895 <p><ol>
2896
2897 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
2898 example host here.</li>
2899
2900 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
2901 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
2902
2903 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
2904 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
2905
2906 </ol></p>
2907
2908 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
2909 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
2910 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
2911 started).</p>
2912
2913 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
2914 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
2915
2916 <p><blockquote><pre>
2917 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
2918 Export list for nas-server:
2919 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
2920 root@tjener:~#
2921 </pre></blockquote></p>
2922
2923 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
2924 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
2925 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
2926 NFS access.</p>
2927
2928 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
2929 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
2930 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
2931
2932 <p><blockquote><pre>
2933 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2934 </pre></blockquote></p>
2935
2936 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
2937 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
2938 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
2939 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
2940
2941 <p><blockquote><pre>
2942 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2943 objectClass: automount
2944 cn: nas-server
2945 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2946
2947 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2948 objectClass: top
2949 objectClass: automountMap
2950 ou: auto.nas-server
2951
2952 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2953 objectClass: automount
2954 cn: /
2955 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
2956 </pre></blockquote></p>
2957
2958 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
2959 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
2960 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
2961
2962 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
2963 the storage server directly by just visiting the
2964 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
2965 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
2966
2967       </div>
2968       <div class="tags">
2969
2970
2971         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>.
2972
2973
2974       </div>
2975     </div>
2976     <div class="padding"></div>
2977
2978     <div class="entry">
2979       <div class="title">
2980         <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>
2981       </div>
2982       <div class="date">
2983         22nd February 2014
2984       </div>
2985       <div class="body">
2986         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
2987 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
2988 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
2989 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
2990 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
2991 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
2992 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
2993 proper home since then.</p>
2994
2995 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
2996 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
2997 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
2998 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
2999 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
3000
3001 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
3002 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
3003 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
3004 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
3005 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
3006 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
3007 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
3008 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
3009 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
3010
3011       </div>
3012       <div class="tags">
3013
3014
3015         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>.
3016
3017
3018       </div>
3019     </div>
3020     <div class="padding"></div>
3021
3022     <div class="entry">
3023       <div class="title">
3024         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
3025       </div>
3026       <div class="date">
3027          3rd February 2014
3028       </div>
3029       <div class="body">
3030         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
3031 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
3032 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
3033 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
3034 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
3035 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
3036 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
3037 <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>,
3038 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
3039
3040 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
3041 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
3042 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
3043 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
3044 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
3045 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
3046
3047 <p><blockquote><pre>
3048 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
3049 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
3050 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
3051 dhclient /dev/eth0
3052 </pre></blockquote></p>
3053
3054 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
3055 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
3056 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
3057
3058 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
3059 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
3060 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
3061 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
3062 side.</p>
3063
3064 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
3065 stuff:</p>
3066
3067 <p><blockquote><pre>
3068 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3069 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
3070 EOF
3071 apt-get update
3072 apt-get dist-upgrade
3073 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
3074     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
3075 update-alternatives --config runsystem
3076 </pre></blockquote></p>
3077
3078 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
3079 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
3080 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
3081 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
3082 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
3083 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
3084 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
3085 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
3086 ssh instead.
3087
3088 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
3089 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
3090 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
3091 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
3092 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
3093 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
3094
3095 <p><blockquote><pre>
3096 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3097 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
3098 EOF
3099 </pre></blockquote></p>
3100
3101 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
3102 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
3103 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
3104 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
3105
3106 <p><blockquote><pre>
3107 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
3108 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
3109 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
3110 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
3111 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
3112 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
3113 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
3114 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
3115 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
3116 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
3117 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
3118 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
3119 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
3120 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
3121 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
3122 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
3123 #
3124 </pre></blockquote></p>
3125
3126 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
3127 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
3128 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
3129 command line stuff.<p>
3130
3131       </div>
3132       <div class="tags">
3133
3134
3135         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>.
3136
3137
3138       </div>
3139     </div>
3140     <div class="padding"></div>
3141
3142     <div class="entry">
3143       <div class="title">
3144         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
3145       </div>
3146       <div class="date">
3147         29th January 2014
3148       </div>
3149       <div class="body">
3150         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
3151 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
3152 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
3153 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
3154 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
3155 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
3156 investigated in
3157 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
3158 from December 2013, in the article
3159 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
3160 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
3161 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
3162 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
3163 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
3164 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
3165 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
3166 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
3167
3168 <p><blockquote>
3169 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
3170 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
3171 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
3172 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
3173 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
3174 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
3175 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
3176 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
3177 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
3178 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
3179 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
3180 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
3181
3182 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
3183 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
3184 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
3185 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
3186 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
3187 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
3188 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
3189 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
3190 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
3191 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
3192 </blockquote><p>
3193
3194 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
3195 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
3196 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
3197 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
3198 summarized like this:</p>
3199
3200 <p><blockquote>
3201 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
3202 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
3203 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
3204 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
3205 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
3206 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
3207 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
3208 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
3209 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
3210 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
3211 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
3212 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
3213 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
3214 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
3215 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
3216 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
3217 </blockquote></p>
3218
3219 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
3220 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
3221 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
3222 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
3223
3224 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3225 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3226 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3227
3228       </div>
3229       <div class="tags">
3230
3231
3232         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>.
3233
3234
3235       </div>
3236     </div>
3237     <div class="padding"></div>
3238
3239     <div class="entry">
3240       <div class="title">
3241         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
3242       </div>
3243       <div class="date">
3244         14th January 2014
3245       </div>
3246       <div class="body">
3247         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
3248 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
3249 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
3250 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
3251 the source.  The company behind it provide
3252 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
3253 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
3254 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
3255 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
3256 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
3257 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
3258 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
3259 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
3260 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
3261 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
3262 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
3263 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
3264 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
3265 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
3266 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
3267 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
3268 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
3269 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
3270 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
3271
3272 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
3273
3274 <ul>
3275
3276   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
3277   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
3278   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
3279
3280 </ul>
3281
3282 <p>You can
3283 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3284 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3285 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3286 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3287 include a test suite check.</p>
3288
3289       </div>
3290       <div class="tags">
3291
3292
3293         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>.
3294
3295
3296       </div>
3297     </div>
3298     <div class="padding"></div>
3299
3300     <div class="entry">
3301       <div class="title">
3302         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
3303       </div>
3304       <div class="date">
3305         25th December 2013
3306       </div>
3307       <div class="body">
3308         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3309 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
3310 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
3311 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
3312 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
3313 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
3314 George</a>.</p>
3315
3316 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
3317
3318 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3319
3320 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
3321 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
3322 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
3323 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
3324 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
3325 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
3326
3327 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
3328 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
3329 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
3330 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
3331 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
3332 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
3333 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
3334 to help building another school's informational education concept from
3335 scratch.</p>
3336
3337 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
3338 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
3339 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
3340
3341 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
3342 and cycling.</p>
3343
3344 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3345 project?</strong></p>
3346
3347 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
3348 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
3349 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
3350 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
3351 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
3352 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
3353
3354 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
3355 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
3356 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
3357 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
3358 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
3359 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
3360 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
3361 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
3362 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
3363
3364 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
3365 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
3366 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
3367 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
3368
3369 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3370 Edu?</strong></p>
3371
3372 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
3373 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
3374 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
3375 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
3376 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
3377 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
3378 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
3379 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
3380 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
3381 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
3382 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
3383 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
3384 that it rocks!</p>
3385
3386 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
3387 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
3388 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
3389 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
3390 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
3391 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
3392 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
3393
3394 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3395 Edu?</strong></p>
3396
3397 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
3398 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
3399 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
3400 can list a few points about that:</p>
3401
3402 <ul>
3403
3404  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
3405  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
3406  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
3407
3408 </ul>
3409
3410 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
3411
3412 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3413
3414 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
3415 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
3416 year.</p>
3417
3418 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
3419 run text tools. I use
3420 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
3421 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
3422 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
3423 based full-featured student management software with the two),
3424 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
3425 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
3426 coloured world called the WWW, I use
3427 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
3428 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
3429 e-mail.</p>
3430
3431 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
3432 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
3433 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
3434 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
3435 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
3436 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
3437 Facebook now ;).</p>
3438
3439 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3440 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3441
3442 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
3443 side is what I have experienced.</p>
3444
3445 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
3446 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
3447 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
3448 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
3449 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
3450 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
3451 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
3452 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
3453 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
3454 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
3455 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
3456 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
3457 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
3458 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
3459 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
3460 plain criminal.</p>
3461
3462 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
3463 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
3464 founded an association named
3465 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
3466 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
3467 area of free and open source software, for example the
3468 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
3469 Teckids and are the youth programme of
3470 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
3471 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
3472 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
3473 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
3474 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
3475 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
3476
3477 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
3478 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
3479 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
3480 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
3481 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
3482 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
3483 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
3484 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
3485 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
3486 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
3487 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
3488 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
3489
3490 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
3491 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
3492 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
3493 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
3494
3495 <!--
3496
3497 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
3498
3499 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
3500 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
3501
3502  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
3503    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
3504    of the decision makers above;
3505  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
3506    knowledge about free software
3507
3508 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
3509
3510 -->
3511
3512       </div>
3513       <div class="tags">
3514
3515
3516         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>.
3517
3518
3519       </div>
3520     </div>
3521     <div class="padding"></div>
3522
3523     <div class="entry">
3524       <div class="title">
3525         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
3526       </div>
3527       <div class="date">
3528          6th December 2013
3529       </div>
3530       <div class="body">
3531         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
3532 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
3533 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
3534 had a new school administrator show up on
3535 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
3536 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
3537 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
3538 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
3539 Germany a few years ago.</p>
3540
3541 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3542
3543 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
3544 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
3545 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
3546 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
3547
3548 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
3549 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
3550 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
3551 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
3552 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
3553 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
3554 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
3555 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
3556 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
3557
3558 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3559 project?</strong></p>
3560
3561 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
3562 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
3563 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
3564 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
3565
3566 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3567 Edu?</strong></p>
3568
3569 <ul>
3570   <li>Quick installation,</li>
3571   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
3572   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
3573   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
3574     single company,</li>
3575   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
3576     experience and problem solutions.</li>
3577 </ul>
3578
3579 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3580 Edu?</strong></p>
3581
3582 <ul>
3583   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
3584   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
3585   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
3586   working again reliably.
3587
3588   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
3589   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
3590   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
3591   as their base.
3592
3593   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
3594   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
3595   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
3596   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
3597   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
3598   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
3599
3600   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
3601   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
3602   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
3603   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
3604   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
3605   schemes.</li>
3606
3607   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
3608   compared to Debian.</li>
3609
3610 </ul>
3611
3612 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
3613 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
3614 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
3615 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
3616
3617 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3618
3619 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
3620 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
3621 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
3622 programming languages for teaching.</p>
3623
3624 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3625 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3626
3627 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
3628
3629 <ul>
3630
3631   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
3632     teaching and learning.</li>
3633
3634   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
3635     home, and at their working place without running into license or
3636     conversion problems.</li>
3637
3638   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
3639     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
3640     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
3641     science, not products.</li>
3642
3643   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
3644     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
3645
3646 </ul>
3647
3648       </div>
3649       <div class="tags">
3650
3651
3652         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>.
3653
3654
3655       </div>
3656     </div>
3657     <div class="padding"></div>
3658
3659     <div class="entry">
3660       <div class="title">
3661         <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>
3662       </div>
3663       <div class="date">
3664         30th November 2013
3665       </div>
3666       <div class="body">
3667         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
3668 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
3669 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
3670 experiment with interesting network technology, the
3671 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
3672 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
3673 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
3674 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
3675 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
3676 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
3677 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
3678 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
3679 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
3680 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
3681 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
3682 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
3683 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
3684 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
3685 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
3686 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
3687
3688       </div>
3689       <div class="tags">
3690
3691
3692         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>.
3693
3694
3695       </div>
3696     </div>
3697     <div class="padding"></div>
3698
3699     <div class="entry">
3700       <div class="title">
3701         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
3702       </div>
3703       <div class="date">
3704         24th November 2013
3705       </div>
3706       <div class="body">
3707         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
3708 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
3709 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
3710 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
3711 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
3712 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
3713 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
3714 is working on.  I checked the
3715 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
3716 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
3717 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
3718 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
3719 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
3720 These are the release notes:</p>
3721
3722 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
3723
3724 <ul>
3725
3726   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
3727    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
3728    up.</li>
3729
3730   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
3731
3732   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
3733    Matthias Klose.</li>
3734
3735   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
3736    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
3737
3738   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
3739    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
3740    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
3741
3742 </ul>
3743
3744 <p>You can
3745 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3746 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3747 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3748 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3749 include a testsuite check.</p>
3750
3751       </div>
3752       <div class="tags">
3753
3754
3755         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>.
3756
3757
3758       </div>
3759     </div>
3760     <div class="padding"></div>
3761
3762     <div class="entry">
3763       <div class="title">
3764         <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>
3765       </div>
3766       <div class="date">
3767         21st November 2013
3768       </div>
3769       <div class="body">
3770         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
3771 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
3772 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
3773 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
3774 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
3775 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
3776 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
3777 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
3778 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
3779 TED talk
3780 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
3781 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
3782 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
3783
3784 <blockquote>
3785
3786 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
3787 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
3788 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
3789 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
3790 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
3791 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
3792 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
3793 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
3794 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
3795 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
3796 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
3797
3798 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
3799 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
3800 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
3801
3802 </blockquote>
3803
3804 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
3805 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
3806 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
3807 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
3808 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
3809 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
3810 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
3811 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
3812 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
3813
3814       </div>
3815       <div class="tags">
3816
3817
3818         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>.
3819
3820
3821       </div>
3822     </div>
3823     <div class="padding"></div>
3824
3825     <div class="entry">
3826       <div class="title">
3827         <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>
3828       </div>
3829       <div class="date">
3830         13th November 2013
3831       </div>
3832       <div class="body">
3833         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
3834 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
3835 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
3836 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
3837 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
3838 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
3839 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
3840 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
3841 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
3842 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
3843 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
3844 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
3845 right away. :)</p>
3846
3847       </div>
3848       <div class="tags">
3849
3850
3851         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>.
3852
3853
3854       </div>
3855     </div>
3856     <div class="padding"></div>
3857
3858     <div class="entry">
3859       <div class="title">
3860         <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>
3861       </div>
3862       <div class="date">
3863         10th November 2013
3864       </div>
3865       <div class="body">
3866         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
3867 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
3868 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
3869 MR3040 as a mesh node using
3870 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
3871
3872 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
3873 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
3874 and downloaded
3875 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
3876 recommended firmware image</a>
3877 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
3878 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
3879 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
3880 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
3881 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
3882
3883 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
3884 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
3885 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
3886 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
3887 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
3888 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
3889 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
3890 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
3891 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
3892 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
3893 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
3894 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
3895 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
3896
3897 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
3898 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
3899 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
3900 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
3901 them:</p>
3902
3903 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
3904
3905 <pre>
3906
3907 config interface 'loopback'
3908         option ifname 'lo'
3909         option proto 'static'
3910         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
3911         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
3912
3913 config globals 'globals'
3914         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
3915
3916 config interface 'lan'
3917         option ifname 'eth0'
3918         option type 'bridge'
3919         option proto 'dhcp'
3920         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
3921         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
3922         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
3923         option ip6assign '60'
3924
3925 config interface 'mesh'
3926         option ifname 'adhoc0'
3927         option mtu '1528'
3928         option proto 'batadv'
3929         option mesh 'bat0'
3930 </pre>
3931
3932 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
3933 <pre>
3934
3935 config wifi-device 'radio0'
3936         option type 'mac80211'
3937         option channel '11'
3938         option hwmode '11ng'
3939         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
3940         option htmode 'HT20'
3941         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
3942         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
3943         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
3944         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
3945         option disabled '0'
3946
3947 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
3948         option device 'radio0'
3949         option ifname 'adhoc0'
3950         option network 'mesh'
3951         option encryption 'none'
3952         option mode 'adhoc'
3953         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
3954         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
3955 </pre>
3956 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
3957 <pre>
3958
3959 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
3960         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
3961         option 'aggregated_ogms'
3962         option 'ap_isolation'
3963         option 'bonding'
3964         option 'fragmentation'
3965         option 'gw_bandwidth'
3966         option 'gw_mode'
3967         option 'gw_sel_class'
3968         option 'log_level'
3969         option 'orig_interval'
3970         option 'vis_mode'
3971         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
3972         option 'distributed_arp_table'
3973         option 'network_coding'
3974         option 'hop_penalty'
3975
3976 # yet another batX instance
3977 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
3978 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
3979 </pre>
3980
3981 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
3982 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
3983 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
3984
3985       </div>
3986       <div class="tags">
3987
3988
3989         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>.
3990
3991
3992       </div>
3993     </div>
3994     <div class="padding"></div>
3995
3996     <div class="entry">
3997       <div class="title">
3998         <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>
3999       </div>
4000       <div class="date">
4001          2nd November 2013
4002       </div>
4003       <div class="body">
4004         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
4005 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
4006 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
4007 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
4008 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
4009
4010 <p><pre>
4011 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
4012 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
4013 # Provides:          rsyslog
4014 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
4015 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
4016 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
4017 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
4018 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
4019 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
4020 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
4021 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
4022 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
4023 ### END INIT INFO
4024 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
4025 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
4026 </pre></p>
4027
4028 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
4029 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
4030 info/comments.</p>
4031
4032 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
4033 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
4034
4035 <p><pre>
4036 #!/bin/sh
4037
4038 # Define LSB log_* functions.
4039 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
4040 # and status_of_proc is working.
4041 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
4042
4043 #
4044 # Function that starts the daemon/service
4045
4046 #
4047 do_start()
4048 {
4049         # Return
4050         #   0 if daemon has been started
4051         #   1 if daemon was already running
4052         #   2 if daemon could not be started
4053         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
4054                 || return 1
4055         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
4056                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
4057                 || return 2
4058         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
4059         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
4060         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
4061 }
4062
4063 #
4064 # Function that stops the daemon/service
4065 #
4066 do_stop()
4067 {
4068         # Return
4069         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
4070         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
4071         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
4072         #   other if a failure occurred
4073         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4074         RETVAL="$?"
4075         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
4076         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
4077         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
4078         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
4079         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
4080         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
4081         # sleep for some time.
4082         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
4083         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
4084         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
4085         rm -f $PIDFILE
4086         return "$RETVAL"
4087 }
4088
4089 #
4090 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
4091 #
4092 do_reload() {
4093         #
4094         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
4095         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
4096         # then implement that here.
4097         #
4098         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4099         return 0
4100 }
4101
4102 SCRIPTNAME=$1
4103 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
4104 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
4105 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
4106     script="$1"
4107     shift
4108     . $script
4109 else
4110     exit 0
4111 fi
4112
4113 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
4114 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
4115
4116 # Exit if the package is not installed
4117 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
4118
4119 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
4120 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
4121
4122 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
4123 . /lib/init/vars.sh
4124
4125 case "$1" in
4126   start)
4127         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
4128         do_start
4129         case "$?" in
4130                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4131                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4132         esac
4133         ;;
4134   stop)
4135         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
4136         do_stop
4137         case "$?" in
4138                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4139                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4140         esac
4141         ;;
4142   status)
4143         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
4144         ;;
4145   #reload|force-reload)
4146         #
4147         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
4148         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
4149         #
4150         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
4151         #do_reload
4152         #log_end_msg $?
4153         #;;
4154   restart|force-reload)
4155         #
4156         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
4157         # 'force-reload' alias
4158         #
4159         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
4160         do_stop
4161         case "$?" in
4162           0|1)
4163                 do_start
4164                 case "$?" in
4165                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
4166                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
4167                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
4168                 esac
4169                 ;;
4170           *)
4171                 # Failed to stop
4172                 log_end_msg 1
4173                 ;;
4174         esac
4175         ;;
4176   *)
4177         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
4178         exit 3
4179         ;;
4180 esac
4181
4182 :
4183 </pre></p>
4184
4185 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
4186 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
4187 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
4188 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
4189
4190 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
4191 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
4192 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
4193 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
4194 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
4195
4196       </div>
4197       <div class="tags">
4198
4199
4200         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>.
4201
4202
4203       </div>
4204     </div>
4205     <div class="padding"></div>
4206
4207     <div class="entry">
4208       <div class="title">
4209         <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>
4210       </div>
4211       <div class="date">
4212          1st November 2013
4213       </div>
4214       <div class="body">
4215         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
4216 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
4217 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
4218 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
4219 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
4220 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
4221 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
4222 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
4223 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
4224 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
4225 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
4226 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
4227
4228 <p>The source is now available from
4229 <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>
4230
4231       </div>
4232       <div class="tags">
4233
4234
4235         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>.
4236
4237
4238       </div>
4239     </div>
4240     <div class="padding"></div>
4241
4242     <div class="entry">
4243       <div class="title">
4244         <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>
4245       </div>
4246       <div class="date">
4247         27th October 2013
4248       </div>
4249       <div class="body">
4250         <p>The
4251 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
4252 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
4253 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
4254 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
4255 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
4256 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
4257 of a plan to simplify the build system for
4258 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
4259 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
4260 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
4261 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
4262 Raspberry Pi.</p>
4263
4264 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
4265 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
4266 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
4267 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
4268 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
4269 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
4270 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
4271 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
4272 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
4273 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
4274 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
4275 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
4276 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
4277 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
4278 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
4279 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
4280 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
4281 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
4282 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
4283 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
4284 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
4285 available from
4286 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
4287 upstream project page</a>.</p>
4288
4289 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
4290 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
4291 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
4292 list:</p>
4293
4294 <p><pre>
4295 #!/bin/sh
4296 set -e # Exit on first error
4297 rootdir="$1"
4298 cd "$rootdir"
4299 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
4300 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
4301 EOF
4302 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
4303 # install a kernel somewhere too.
4304 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
4305     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4306 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4307 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
4308 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
4309 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
4310 </pre></p>
4311
4312 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
4313 to build the image:</p>
4314
4315 <pre>
4316 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
4317     --variant minbase \
4318     --arch armel \
4319     --distribution jessie \
4320     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
4321     --image test.img \
4322     --size 600M \
4323     --bootsize 64M \
4324     --boottype vfat \
4325     --log-level debug \
4326     --verbose \
4327     --no-kernel \
4328     --no-extlinux \
4329     --root-password raspberry \
4330     --hostname raspberrypi \
4331     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
4332     --customize `pwd`/customize \
4333     --package netbase \
4334     --package git-core \
4335     --package binutils \
4336     --package ca-certificates \
4337     --package wget \
4338     --package kmod
4339 </pre></p>
4340
4341 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
4342 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
4343 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
4344 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
4345 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
4346 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
4347 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
4348
4349 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
4350 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
4351 build dependency list.</p>
4352
4353 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
4354 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
4355 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
4356 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
4357
4358       </div>
4359       <div class="tags">
4360
4361
4362         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>.
4363
4364
4365       </div>
4366     </div>
4367     <div class="padding"></div>
4368
4369     <div class="entry">
4370       <div class="title">
4371         <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>
4372       </div>
4373       <div class="date">
4374         21st October 2013
4375       </div>
4376       <div class="body">
4377         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
4378 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
4379 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
4380 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
4381 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
4382 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
4383 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
4384 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
4385
4386 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
4387 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
4388 instead, I started playing with a
4389 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
4390 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
4391 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
4392 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
4393 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
4394 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
4395 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
4396 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
4397 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
4398 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
4399 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
4400 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
4401 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
4402 every client on the local network.</p>
4403
4404 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
4405 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
4406 and a script
4407 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
4408 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
4409 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
4410 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
4411 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
4412 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
4413 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
4414 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
4415 support.</p>
4416
4417 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
4418 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
4419
4420 <p><pre>
4421 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
4422     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
4423 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
4424 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
4425 %
4426 </pre></p>
4427
4428 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
4429 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
4430 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
4431 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
4432 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
4433 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
4434
4435 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
4436 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
4437 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
4438
4439 <p><table>
4440
4441 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
4442 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
4443 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
4444 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
4445 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
4446 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
4447
4448 </table></p>
4449
4450 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
4451 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
4452 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
4453 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
4454 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
4455 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
4456 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
4457
4458       </div>
4459       <div class="tags">
4460
4461
4462         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>.
4463
4464
4465       </div>
4466     </div>
4467     <div class="padding"></div>
4468
4469     <div class="entry">
4470       <div class="title">
4471         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html">Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github</a>
4472       </div>
4473       <div class="date">
4474         19th October 2013
4475       </div>
4476       <div class="body">
4477         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
4478 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
4479 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
4480 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
4481 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
4482 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
4483 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
4484 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
4485
4486       </div>
4487       <div class="tags">
4488
4489
4490         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>.
4491
4492
4493       </div>
4494     </div>
4495     <div class="padding"></div>
4496
4497     <div class="entry">
4498       <div class="title">
4499         <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>
4500       </div>
4501       <div class="date">
4502         15th October 2013
4503       </div>
4504       <div class="body">
4505         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
4506 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
4507 these. :)</p>
4508
4509 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
4510 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
4511 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
4512 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
4513 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
4514 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
4515 hope you will to. :)</p>
4516
4517 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
4518 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
4519 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
4520 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
4521 donated.  Are you next?</p>
4522
4523 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
4524 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
4525 statement under the heading
4526 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
4527 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
4528 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
4529 too.</p>
4530
4531       </div>
4532       <div class="tags">
4533
4534
4535         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>.
4536
4537
4538       </div>
4539     </div>
4540     <div class="padding"></div>
4541
4542     <div class="entry">
4543       <div class="title">
4544         <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>
4545       </div>
4546       <div class="date">
4547         11th October 2013
4548       </div>
4549       <div class="body">
4550         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
4551 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
4552 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
4553 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
4554 successful examples like
4555 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
4556 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
4557 (see
4558 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
4559 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
4560 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
4561 can be seen from their
4562 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
4563 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
4564 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
4565 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
4566 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
4567
4568 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
4569 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
4570 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
4571 my recent involvement in
4572 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
4573 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
4574 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
4575 when possible, given that most communication between people are
4576 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
4577 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
4578 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
4579 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
4580 important over the years.</p>
4581
4582 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
4583 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
4584 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
4585 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
4586 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
4587 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
4588 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
4589 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
4590 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
4591 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
4592 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
4593 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
4594 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
4595 speakers about this talk (from
4596 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
4597
4598 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
4599
4600 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
4601 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
4602 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
4603 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
4604 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
4605 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
4606 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
4607 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
4608 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
4609 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
4610 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
4611 that project (from
4612 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
4613
4614 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
4615
4616 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
4617 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
4618 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
4619 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
4620 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
4621 based community mesh networks.</p>
4622
4623 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
4624 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
4625 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
4626 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
4627 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
4628 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
4629 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
4630 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
4631 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
4632
4633 <p><table>
4634 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
4635 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
4636 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
4637 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
4638 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
4639 </table></p>
4640
4641 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
4642 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
4643 VillageTelco about
4644 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
4645 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
4646 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
4647 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
4648 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
4649 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
4650
4651 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
4652 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
4653 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
4654 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
4655
4656 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
4657 us on IRC, either channel
4658 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
4659 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
4660 irc.freenode.net.</p>
4661
4662 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
4663 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
4664 and Innovation called
4665 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
4666 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
4667 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
4668 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
4669 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
4670 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
4671 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
4672 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
4673
4674 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
4675 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
4676 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
4677 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
4678 mesh system.</p>
4679
4680       </div>
4681       <div class="tags">
4682
4683
4684         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>.
4685
4686
4687       </div>
4688     </div>
4689     <div class="padding"></div>
4690
4691     <div class="entry">
4692       <div class="title">
4693         <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>
4694       </div>
4695       <div class="date">
4696          8th October 2013
4697       </div>
4698       <div class="body">
4699         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
4700 Salvador had published a
4701 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
4702 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
4703 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
4704 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
4705 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
4706 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
4707 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
4708 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
4709 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
4710 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
4711 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
4712 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
4713 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
4714 computers without hard drives by installing one central
4715 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
4716
4717 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
4718
4719 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
4720
4721 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
4722 me know. :)</p>
4723
4724       </div>
4725       <div class="tags">
4726
4727
4728         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>.
4729
4730
4731       </div>
4732     </div>
4733     <div class="padding"></div>
4734
4735     <div class="entry">
4736       <div class="title">
4737         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
4738       </div>
4739       <div class="date">
4740         29th September 2013
4741       </div>
4742       <div class="body">
4743         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
4744 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
4745 complete announcement text can be found at
4746 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
4747 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
4748
4749 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
4750 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
4751 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
4752 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
4753
4754       </div>
4755       <div class="tags">
4756
4757
4758         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>.
4759
4760
4761       </div>
4762     </div>
4763     <div class="padding"></div>
4764
4765     <div class="entry">
4766       <div class="title">
4767         <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>
4768       </div>
4769       <div class="date">
4770         27th September 2013
4771       </div>
4772       <div class="body">
4773         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
4774 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
4775 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
4776 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
4777
4778 <ul>
4779
4780 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
4781 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
4782
4783 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
4784 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
4785
4786 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
4787 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
4788 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
4789 (Youtube)</li>
4790
4791 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
4792 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
4793
4794 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
4795 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
4796
4797 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
4798 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
4799 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
4800
4801 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
4802 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
4803 (Youtube)</li>
4804
4805 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
4806 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
4807
4808 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
4809 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
4810
4811 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
4812 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
4813 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
4814
4815 </ul>
4816
4817 <p>A larger list is available from
4818 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
4819 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
4820
4821 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
4822 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
4823 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
4824 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
4825 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
4826 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
4827 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
4828 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
4829 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
4830 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
4831 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
4832
4833       </div>
4834       <div class="tags">
4835
4836
4837         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>.
4838
4839
4840       </div>
4841     </div>
4842     <div class="padding"></div>
4843
4844     <div class="entry">
4845       <div class="title">
4846         <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>
4847       </div>
4848       <div class="date">
4849         16th September 2013
4850       </div>
4851       <div class="body">
4852         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
4853 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
4854
4855 <blockquote>
4856 <p>Hi,</p>
4857
4858 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
4859 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
4860 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
4861
4862 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
4863 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
4864 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
4865 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
4866
4867 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
4868 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
4869
4870 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
4871 compared to beta1:</p>
4872
4873 <ul>
4874
4875 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
4876 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
4877 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
4878 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
4879 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
4880 main server.</li>
4881 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
4882 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
4883 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
4884 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
4885 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
4886
4887 </ul>
4888
4889 <p>Where to get it:</p>
4890
4891 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
4892
4893 <ul>
4894 <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>
4895 <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>
4896 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
4897 </ul>
4898
4899 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
4900
4901 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
4902 <ul>
4903 <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>
4904 <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>
4905 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
4906 </ul>
4907
4908 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
4909
4910 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
4911 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
4912 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
4913 as the other isos.</p>
4914
4915 <p>How to report bugs</p>
4916
4917 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
4918 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
4919
4920
4921 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
4922
4923 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
4924 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
4925 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
4926 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
4927 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
4928 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
4929 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
4930 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
4931 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
4932 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
4933 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
4934 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
4935 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
4936
4937 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
4938 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
4939 Squeeze release.</p>
4940
4941 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
4942
4943 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
4944 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
4945 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
4946 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
4947 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
4948 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
4949 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
4950 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
4951 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
4952 directory.</p>
4953
4954
4955 <p>cheers,
4956 <br>        Holger</p>
4957 </blockquote>
4958
4959       </div>
4960       <div class="tags">
4961
4962
4963         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>.
4964
4965
4966       </div>
4967     </div>
4968     <div class="padding"></div>
4969
4970     <div class="entry">
4971       <div class="title">
4972         <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>
4973       </div>
4974       <div class="date">
4975         10th September 2013
4976       </div>
4977       <div class="body">
4978         <p>I was introduced to the
4979 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
4980 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
4981 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
4982 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
4983 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
4984 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
4985 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
4986 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
4987
4988 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
4989 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
4990 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
4991 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
4992 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
4993
4994 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
4995 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
4996 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
4997 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
4998 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
4999 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
5000 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
5001 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
5002 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
5003 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
5004 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
5005 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
5006 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
5007 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
5008 missing in Debian).</p>
5009
5010 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
5011 scripts
5012 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
5013 and a administrative web interface
5014 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
5015 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
5016 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
5017 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
5018 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
5019 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
5020 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
5021 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
5022 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
5023 this is really working yet, see
5024 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
5025 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
5026 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
5027 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
5028 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
5029 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
5030 with lots of half baked features.</p>
5031
5032 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
5033 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
5034 at.</p>
5035
5036 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
5037
5038 <ol>
5039
5040 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
5041 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
5042 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
5043 to the Debian installer:<p>
5044 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
5045
5046 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
5047 install on.</li>
5048
5049 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
5050 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
5051
5052 </ol>
5053
5054 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
5055
5056 <ol>
5057
5058 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
5059 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
5060 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
5061 <pre>
5062 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
5063 </pre></li>
5064 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
5065 <pre>
5066 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
5067    apt-key add -
5068 apt-get update
5069 apt-get install freedombox-setup
5070 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
5071 </pre></li>
5072 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
5073
5074 </ol>
5075
5076 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
5077 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
5078 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
5079 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
5080 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
5081
5082 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
5083 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
5084 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
5085 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
5086
5087 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
5088 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
5089 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
5090 irc.debian.org and the
5091 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
5092 mailing list</a>.</p>
5093
5094 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
5095 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
5096 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
5097 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
5098 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
5099 default password is 'secret'.</p>
5100
5101       </div>
5102       <div class="tags">
5103
5104
5105         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>.
5106
5107
5108       </div>
5109     </div>
5110     <div class="padding"></div>
5111
5112     <div class="entry">
5113       <div class="title">
5114         <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>
5115       </div>
5116       <div class="date">
5117         22nd August 2013
5118       </div>
5119       <div class="body">
5120         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5121 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
5122 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
5123
5124 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
5125
5126 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5127 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5128
5129 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5130
5131 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5132 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5133 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5134 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5135 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5136 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5137 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5138 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
5139 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5140 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5141 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5142 desktop contains
5143 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5144 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5145 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5146 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5147
5148 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
5149 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
5150 release.</p>
5151
5152 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5153 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5154 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
5155 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
5156 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
5157 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
5158 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
5159 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
5160 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
5161 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
5162 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
5163
5164 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5165
5166 <ul>
5167
5168 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
5169     work also without a attached tty.</li>
5170 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
5171     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
5172     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
5173     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
5174     required).</li>
5175
5176 </ul>
5177
5178 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5179
5180 <ul>
5181
5182 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
5183 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
5184 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
5185 stick ISO image.</li>
5186 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
5187 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
5188 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
5189     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
5190     cope with this.</li>
5191 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
5192 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
5193     empty password hashes.</li>
5194 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
5195     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
5196     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
5197
5198 </ul>
5199
5200 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5201
5202 <ul>
5203
5204 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
5205     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
5206 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
5207     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
5208
5209 </ul>
5210
5211 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5212
5213 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5214
5215 <ul>
5216
5217 <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>
5218
5219 <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>
5220
5221 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
5222
5223 </ul>
5224
5225 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
5226 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
5227
5228 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5229
5230 <ul>
5231
5232 <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>
5233 <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>
5234 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
5235
5236 </ul>
5237
5238 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
5239 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
5240
5241
5242 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5243
5244 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
5245
5246       </div>
5247       <div class="tags">
5248
5249
5250         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>.
5251
5252
5253       </div>
5254     </div>
5255     <div class="padding"></div>
5256
5257     <div class="entry">
5258       <div class="title">
5259         <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>
5260       </div>
5261       <div class="date">
5262         18th August 2013
5263       </div>
5264       <div class="body">
5265         <p>Earlier, I reported about
5266 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
5267 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
5268 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
5269 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
5270 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
5271 currently on the disk.</p>
5272
5273 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
5274 <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>
5275 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
5276 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
5277 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
5278 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
5279 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
5280 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
5281 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
5282 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
5283 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
5284 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
5285 the broken disks.</p>
5286
5287       </div>
5288       <div class="tags">
5289
5290
5291         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>.
5292
5293
5294       </div>
5295     </div>
5296     <div class="padding"></div>
5297
5298     <div class="entry">
5299       <div class="title">
5300         <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>
5301       </div>
5302       <div class="date">
5303          2nd August 2013
5304       </div>
5305       <div class="body">
5306         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
5307 have worked on a Norwegian
5308 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
5309 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
5310 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
5311 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
5312 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
5313 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
5314 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
5315 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
5316 progress of the translation:</p>
5317
5318 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
5319
5320 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
5321 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
5322 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
5323 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
5324 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
5325 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
5326 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
5327 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
5328 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
5329 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
5330 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
5331
5332 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
5333 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
5334 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
5335 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
5336 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
5337 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
5338 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
5339 project files currently available from
5340 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
5341
5342 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
5343 the updated
5344 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
5345 and
5346 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
5347 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
5348 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
5349 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
5350
5351       </div>
5352       <div class="tags">
5353
5354
5355         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>.
5356
5357
5358       </div>
5359     </div>
5360     <div class="padding"></div>
5361
5362     <div class="entry">
5363       <div class="title">
5364         <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>
5365       </div>
5366       <div class="date">
5367         27th July 2013
5368       </div>
5369       <div class="body">
5370         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5371 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
5372
5373 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
5374 2013-07-27</strong></p>
5375
5376 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5377 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5378
5379 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5380
5381 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5382 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5383 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5384 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5385 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5386 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5387 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5388 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
5389 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5390 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5391 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5392 desktop contains
5393 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5394 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5395 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5396 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5397
5398 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5399 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5400 Squeeze release.</p>
5401
5402 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5403 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5404 release.</p>
5405
5406 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5407
5408 <ul>
5409
5410 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
5411    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
5412 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
5413    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
5414    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
5415    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
5416    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
5417 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
5418 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
5419 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
5420    crash bugs.</li>
5421
5422 </ul>
5423
5424 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5425
5426 <ul>
5427
5428 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
5429    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
5430 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
5431    netinst CD.</li>
5432 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
5433    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
5434 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
5435    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
5436    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
5437 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
5438    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
5439    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
5440 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
5441    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
5442    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
5443 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
5444    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
5445 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
5446
5447 </ul>
5448
5449 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5450
5451 <ul>
5452
5453 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
5454 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
5455     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
5456 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
5457
5458 </ul>
5459
5460 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5461
5462 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5463
5464 <ul>
5465
5466 <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>
5467
5468 <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>
5469
5470 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
5471
5472 </ul>
5473
5474 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
5475 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
5476
5477 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5478
5479 <ul>
5480
5481 <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>
5482 <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>
5483 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
5484
5485 </ul>
5486
5487 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
5488 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
5489
5490
5491 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5492
5493 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
5494
5495       </div>
5496       <div class="tags">
5497
5498
5499         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>.
5500
5501
5502       </div>
5503     </div>
5504     <div class="padding"></div>
5505
5506     <div class="entry">
5507       <div class="title">
5508         <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>
5509       </div>
5510       <div class="date">
5511         17th July 2013
5512       </div>
5513       <div class="body">
5514         <p>Today I switched to
5515 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
5516 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
5517 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
5518 <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
5519 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
5520 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
5521 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
5522 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
5523 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
5524 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
5525 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
5526 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
5527 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
5528 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
5529 station from now on.</p>
5530
5531 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
5532 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
5533 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
5534 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
5535 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
5536 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
5537 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
5538 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
5539 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
5540 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
5541 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
5542 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
5543
5544 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
5545 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
5546 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
5547 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
5548 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
5549 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
5550 parameters are tuned:</p>
5551
5552 <ul>
5553
5554 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
5555     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
5556
5557 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
5558     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
5559     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
5560
5561 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
5562     systems.</li>
5563
5564 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
5565     /etc/fstab.</li>
5566
5567 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
5568
5569 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
5570     cron.daily).</li>
5571
5572 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
5573     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
5574
5575 </ul>
5576
5577 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
5578 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
5579 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
5580 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
5581 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
5582 from getting the data on the disk (see
5583 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
5584 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
5585 right thing to do.</p>
5586
5587 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
5588 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
5589 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
5590
5591 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
5592 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
5593 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
5594 instead of during my work.</p>
5595
5596 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
5597 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
5598
5599 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
5600 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
5601 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
5602
5603 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
5604 there.</p>
5605
5606 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
5607 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
5608 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
5609 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
5610 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
5611 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
5612 back.</p>
5613
5614       </div>
5615       <div class="tags">
5616
5617
5618         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>.
5619
5620
5621       </div>
5622     </div>
5623     <div class="padding"></div>
5624
5625     <div class="entry">
5626       <div class="title">
5627         <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>
5628       </div>
5629       <div class="date">
5630         10th July 2013
5631       </div>
5632       <div class="body">
5633         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
5634 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
5635 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
5636 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
5637 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
5638 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
5639 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
5640 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
5641
5642 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
5643 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
5644 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
5645 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
5646 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
5647 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
5648 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
5649 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
5650 lock up when I download a new
5651 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
5652 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
5653 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
5654
5655 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
5656 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
5657 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
5658 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
5659 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
5660 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
5661
5662 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
5663 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
5664 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
5665 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
5666 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
5667 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
5668
5669 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
5670 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
5671 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
5672 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
5673 exist).</p>
5674
5675       </div>
5676       <div class="tags">
5677
5678
5679         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>.
5680
5681
5682       </div>
5683     </div>
5684     <div class="padding"></div>
5685
5686     <div class="entry">
5687       <div class="title">
5688         <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>
5689       </div>
5690       <div class="date">
5691          9th July 2013
5692       </div>
5693       <div class="body">
5694         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
5695 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
5696 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
5697 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
5698 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5699 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
5700 Bitraf</a>.</p>
5701
5702 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
5703 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
5704 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
5705 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
5706 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
5707
5708       </div>
5709       <div class="tags">
5710
5711
5712         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>.
5713
5714
5715       </div>
5716     </div>
5717     <div class="padding"></div>
5718
5719     <div class="entry">
5720       <div class="title">
5721         <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>
5722       </div>
5723       <div class="date">
5724          5th July 2013
5725       </div>
5726       <div class="body">
5727         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
5728 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
5729 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
5730 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
5731 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
5732 ended up picking a
5733 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
5734 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
5735 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
5736 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
5737 on that below.</p>
5738
5739 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
5740 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
5741 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
5742 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
5743 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
5744 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
5745 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
5746 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
5747 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
5748
5749 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
5750 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
5751 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
5752 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
5753 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
5754 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
5755 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
5756
5757 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
5758 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
5759
5760 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
5761 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
5762 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
5763 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
5764 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
5765 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
5766 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
5767 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
5768 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
5769 kernel developers as
5770 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
5771 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
5772 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
5773 Lenovo forums, both for
5774 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
5775 2012-11-10</a> and for
5776 <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
5777 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
5778 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
5779 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
5780 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
5781 There is even a
5782 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
5783 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
5784 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
5785
5786 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
5787 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
5788 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
5789 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
5790 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
5791 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
5792 fixed. :)</p>
5793
5794       </div>
5795       <div class="tags">
5796
5797
5798         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>.
5799
5800
5801       </div>
5802     </div>
5803     <div class="padding"></div>
5804
5805     <div class="entry">
5806       <div class="title">
5807         <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>
5808       </div>
5809       <div class="date">
5810          4th July 2013
5811       </div>
5812       <div class="body">
5813         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
5814 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
5815 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
5816 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
5817 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
5818 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
5819 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
5820 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
5821 with an expencive door stop.</p>
5822
5823 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
5824 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
5825 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
5826 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
5827 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
5828 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
5829 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
5830
5831 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
5832 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
5833 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
5834 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
5835 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
5836 new laptop now. :)</p>
5837
5838 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
5839
5840       </div>
5841       <div class="tags">
5842
5843
5844         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>.
5845
5846
5847       </div>
5848     </div>
5849     <div class="padding"></div>
5850
5851     <div class="entry">
5852       <div class="title">
5853         <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>
5854       </div>
5855       <div class="date">
5856          3rd July 2013
5857       </div>
5858       <div class="body">
5859         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5860 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
5861
5862 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
5863 2013-07-03</strong></p>
5864
5865 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5866 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5867
5868 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5869
5870 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5871 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5872 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5873 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5874 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5875 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5876 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5877 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
5878 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5879 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5880 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5881 desktop contains
5882 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5883 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5884 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5885 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5886
5887 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5888 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5889 Squeeze release.</p>
5890
5891 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5892 <ul>
5893   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
5894   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
5895     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
5896     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
5897   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
5898     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
5899     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
5900   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
5901     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
5902     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
5903     too.</li>
5904   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
5905     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
5906 </ul>
5907 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5908 <ul>
5909   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
5910   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
5911   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
5912     up for some language options.</li>
5913   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
5914   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
5915   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
5916     d-i is doing it.</li>
5917   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
5918     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
5919   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
5920     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
5921     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
5922   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
5923     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
5924   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
5925   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
5926     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
5927   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
5928     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
5929 </ul>
5930 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5931 <ul>
5932   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
5933     available yet (698840).</li>
5934   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
5935 </ul>
5936 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5937
5938 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5939 <ul>
5940   <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>
5941   <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>
5942   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
5943 </ul>
5944
5945 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
5946 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
5947
5948 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5949 <ul>
5950   <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>
5951   <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>
5952   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
5953 </ul>
5954
5955 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
5956 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
5957
5958 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5959
5960 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
5961
5962       </div>
5963       <div class="tags">
5964
5965
5966         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>.
5967
5968
5969       </div>
5970     </div>
5971     <div class="padding"></div>
5972
5973     <div class="entry">
5974       <div class="title">
5975         <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>
5976       </div>
5977       <div class="date">
5978         25th June 2013
5979       </div>
5980       <div class="body">
5981         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
5982 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
5983 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
5984 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
5985 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
5986 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
5987 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
5988 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
5989 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
5990 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
5991 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
5992
5993 <p><pre>
5994 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
5995 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
5996 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
5997 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
5998 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
5999 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
6000 firmware-ipw2x00
6001 firmware-ipw2x00
6002 Preconfiguring packages ...
6003 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
6004 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
6005 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
6006 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
6007 #
6008 </pre></p>
6009
6010 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
6011 printed instead:</p>
6012
6013 <p><pre>
6014 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
6015 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
6016 #
6017 </pre></p>
6018
6019 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
6020 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
6021
6022 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
6023 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
6024 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
6025 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
6026 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
6027 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
6028 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
6029 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
6030 machine.</p>
6031
6032 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
6033 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
6034 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
6035 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
6036 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
6037 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
6038
6039       </div>
6040       <div class="tags">
6041
6042
6043         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>.
6044
6045
6046       </div>
6047     </div>
6048     <div class="padding"></div>
6049
6050     <div class="entry">
6051       <div class="title">
6052         <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>
6053       </div>
6054       <div class="date">
6055         22nd June 2013
6056       </div>
6057       <div class="body">
6058         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6059 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
6060 which check that services are running, working, and return the
6061 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
6062 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
6063 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
6064 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
6065 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
6066 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
6067
6068 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
6069 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
6070 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
6071 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
6072 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
6073 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
6074 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
6075 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
6076 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
6077 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
6078 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
6079 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
6080 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
6081 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
6082
6083 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
6084 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
6085 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
6086 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
6087 the problem.</p>
6088
6089 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
6090 please join us on
6091 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
6092 irc.debian.org</a> and the
6093 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
6094 list.</p>
6095
6096       </div>
6097       <div class="tags">
6098
6099
6100         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>.
6101
6102
6103       </div>
6104     </div>
6105     <div class="padding"></div>
6106
6107     <div class="entry">
6108       <div class="title">
6109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
6110       </div>
6111       <div class="date">
6112         17th June 2013
6113       </div>
6114       <div class="body">
6115         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
6116 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
6117 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
6118 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
6119 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
6120 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
6121 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
6122 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
6123
6124 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6125
6126 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
6127 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
6128 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
6129 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
6130 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
6131 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
6132 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
6133 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
6134 field.</p>
6135
6136 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
6137 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
6138 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
6139 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
6140 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
6141 the only one we have in our country.</p>
6142
6143 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6144 project?</strong></p>
6145
6146 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
6147 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
6148 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
6149 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
6150 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
6151 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
6152 ways to contribute.</p>
6153
6154 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
6155 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
6156 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
6157 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
6158 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
6159 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
6160 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
6161 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
6162 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
6163 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
6164
6165 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6166 Edu?</strong></p>
6167
6168 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
6169 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
6170 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
6171 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
6172 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
6173 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
6174 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
6175 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
6176
6177 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
6178 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
6179 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
6180 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
6181 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
6182 project.</p>
6183
6184 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6185 Edu?</strong></p>
6186
6187 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
6188 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
6189 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
6190 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
6191 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
6192 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
6193 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
6194 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
6195 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
6196
6197 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
6198 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
6199 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
6200 on.</p>
6201
6202 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6203
6204 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
6205 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
6206 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
6207 Enlightenment project a lot!),
6208 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
6209 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
6210 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
6211 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
6212 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
6213
6214 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6215 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6216
6217 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
6218 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
6219 that:</p>
6220
6221 <ul>
6222
6223 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
6224
6225 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
6226     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
6227     of teenagers more?</li>
6228
6229 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
6230     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
6231     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
6232     them!)</li>
6233
6234 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
6235     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
6236     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
6237
6238 </ul>
6239
6240 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
6241 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
6242 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
6243 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
6244 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
6245
6246       </div>
6247       <div class="tags">
6248
6249
6250         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>.
6251
6252
6253       </div>
6254     </div>
6255     <div class="padding"></div>
6256
6257     <div class="entry">
6258       <div class="title">
6259         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
6260       </div>
6261       <div class="date">
6262         12th June 2013
6263       </div>
6264       <div class="body">
6265         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
6266 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6267 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
6268 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
6269 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
6270 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
6271
6272 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6273
6274 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
6275 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
6276 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
6277
6278 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
6279 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
6280 each other.</p>
6281
6282 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6283 project?</strong></p>
6284
6285 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
6286 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
6287 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
6288 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
6289 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
6290 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
6291 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
6292 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
6293 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
6294 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
6295 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
6296 we'll get there one day.</p>
6297
6298 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6299 Edu?</strong></p>
6300
6301 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
6302 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
6303 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
6304 very high quality work.</p>
6305
6306 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
6307 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
6308 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
6309 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
6310 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
6311
6312 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6313 Edu?</strong></p>
6314
6315 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
6316 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
6317 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
6318
6319 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
6320 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
6321 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
6322 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
6323 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
6324 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
6325 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
6326 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
6327 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
6328 currently.</p>
6329
6330 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
6331 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
6332 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
6333 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
6334 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
6335 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
6336 autonomous.</p>
6337
6338 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6339
6340 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
6341 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
6342 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
6343 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
6344 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
6345
6346 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
6347 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
6348 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
6349 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
6350 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
6351 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
6352 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
6353 X.</p>
6354
6355 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
6356 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
6357 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
6358 it :p)
6359
6360 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6361 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6362
6363 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
6364 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
6365 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
6366 that.</p>
6367
6368 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
6369 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
6370 advantage of that.</p>
6371
6372 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
6373 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
6374 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
6375 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
6376 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
6377 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
6378 best solution for them.</p>
6379
6380 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
6381 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
6382 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
6383
6384       </div>
6385       <div class="tags">
6386
6387
6388         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>.
6389
6390
6391       </div>
6392     </div>
6393     <div class="padding"></div>
6394
6395     <div class="entry">
6396       <div class="title">
6397         <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>
6398       </div>
6399       <div class="date">
6400         11th June 2013
6401       </div>
6402       <div class="body">
6403         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
6404 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
6405 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
6406 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
6407 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
6408 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
6409 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
6410 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
6411 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
6412 i915 driver used by the
6413 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
6414 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
6415
6416 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
6417 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
6418 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
6419 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
6420 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
6421
6422 <pre>
6423 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
6424 update-initramfs -u -k all
6425 </pre>
6426
6427 <p>Since March 2012 there is
6428 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
6429 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
6430 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
6431 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
6432 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
6433 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
6434 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
6435 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
6436 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
6437 number.</p>
6438
6439 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
6440 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
6441
6442 <p><pre>
6443 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
6444     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
6445     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
6446  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
6447  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
6448     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
6449  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
6450     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
6451  Latency: 0
6452  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
6453  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
6454  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
6455  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
6456  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
6457  Capabilities: <access denied>
6458  Kernel driver in use: i915
6459 </pre></p>
6460
6461 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
6462
6463 <p><pre>
6464 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
6465        ...
6466         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
6467         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
6468        ...
6469 }
6470 </pre></p>
6471
6472 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
6473 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
6474 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
6475 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
6476 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
6477 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
6478 yet shown up in
6479 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
6480 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
6481 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
6482 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
6483 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
6484 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
6485
6486 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
6487 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
6488 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
6489 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
6490 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
6491 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
6492 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
6493 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
6494 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
6495 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
6496 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
6497 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
6498
6499 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
6500 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
6501 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
6502 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
6503 backlight.</p>
6504
6505       </div>
6506       <div class="tags">
6507
6508
6509         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>.
6510
6511
6512       </div>
6513     </div>
6514     <div class="padding"></div>
6515
6516     <div class="entry">
6517       <div class="title">
6518         <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>
6519       </div>
6520       <div class="date">
6521         10th June 2013
6522       </div>
6523       <div class="body">
6524         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
6525 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
6526
6527 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
6528 2013-06-10</strong></p>
6529
6530 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
6531 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
6532
6533 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
6534
6535 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
6536 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
6537 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
6538 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
6539 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
6540 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
6541 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
6542 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
6543 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
6544 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
6545 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
6546 desktop contains
6547 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
6548 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
6549 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
6550 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
6551
6552 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
6553 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
6554 Squeeze release.</p>
6555
6556 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
6557
6558 <ul>
6559
6560 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
6561 <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).
6562 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
6563 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
6564 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
6565
6566 </ul>
6567
6568 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
6569
6570 <ul>
6571
6572 <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.
6573 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
6574 <li>New Romanian translation.
6575 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
6576 <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).
6577 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
6578 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
6579 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
6580 <li>More testsuite tests.
6581 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
6582 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
6583
6584 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
6585 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
6586
6587 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
6588 them up with GOsa².</li>
6589
6590 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
6591
6592 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
6593 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
6594 entered password). </li>
6595
6596 </ul>
6597
6598 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
6599
6600 <ul>
6601
6602 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
6603
6604 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
6605 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
6606 missing import feature).</li>
6607
6608 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
6609
6610 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
6611 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
6612 unfixed.</li>
6613
6614 </ul>
6615
6616 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
6617
6618 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
6619
6620 <ul>
6621
6622 <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>
6623
6624 <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>
6625
6626 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
6627
6628 </ul>
6629
6630 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
6631 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
6632
6633 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
6634
6635 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
6636
6637       </div>
6638       <div class="tags">
6639
6640
6641         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>.
6642
6643
6644       </div>
6645     </div>
6646     <div class="padding"></div>
6647
6648     <div class="entry">
6649       <div class="title">
6650         <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>
6651       </div>
6652       <div class="date">
6653          5th June 2013
6654       </div>
6655       <div class="body">
6656         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
6657 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
6658 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
6659 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
6660 the project:
6661
6662 <ol>
6663
6664 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
6665   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
6666   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
6667   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
6668   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
6669
6670 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
6671   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
6672   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
6673   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
6674   #698840</a>.</li>
6675
6676 </ol>
6677
6678 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
6679 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
6680 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
6681
6682       </div>
6683       <div class="tags">
6684
6685
6686         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>.
6687
6688
6689       </div>
6690     </div>
6691     <div class="padding"></div>
6692
6693     <div class="entry">
6694       <div class="title">
6695         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
6696       </div>
6697       <div class="date">
6698          4th June 2013
6699       </div>
6700       <div class="body">
6701         <p>It has been a while since my last English
6702 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
6703 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
6704 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
6705 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
6706 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
6707
6708 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6709
6710 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
6711 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
6712 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
6713 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
6714
6715 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
6716 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
6717 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
6718
6719 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6720 project?</strong></p>
6721
6722 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
6723 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
6724 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
6725 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
6726 manual.
6727
6728 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
6729 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
6730 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
6731 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
6732
6733 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
6734 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
6735 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
6736 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
6737 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
6738 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
6739 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
6740 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
6741 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
6742 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
6743
6744 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
6745 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
6746 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
6747 beautiful project.</p>
6748
6749 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6750 Edu?</strong></p>
6751
6752 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
6753 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
6754 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
6755
6756 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
6757 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
6758 of educational free software.</p>
6759
6760 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6761 Edu?</strong></p>
6762
6763 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
6764 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
6765 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
6766 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
6767 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
6768
6769 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
6770 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
6771 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
6772 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
6773 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
6774 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
6775 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
6776 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
6777
6778 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6779
6780 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
6781 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
6782 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
6783 also using the mathematical software
6784 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
6785 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
6786 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
6787
6788 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
6789 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
6790 statistics?</strong></p>
6791
6792 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
6793 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
6794 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
6795 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
6796
6797 <ul>
6798
6799 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
6800 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
6801 constructions in planar geometry
6802
6803 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
6804 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
6805 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
6806
6807 </ul>
6808
6809 <p>I like also
6810 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
6811 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
6812 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
6813
6814 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6815 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6816
6817 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
6818
6819 <ul>
6820
6821 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
6822
6823 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
6824     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
6825     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
6826
6827 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
6828
6829 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
6830     system.</li>
6831
6832 </ul>
6833
6834       </div>
6835       <div class="tags">
6836
6837
6838         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>.
6839
6840
6841       </div>
6842     </div>
6843     <div class="padding"></div>
6844
6845     <div class="entry">
6846       <div class="title">
6847         <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>
6848       </div>
6849       <div class="date">
6850          1st June 2013
6851       </div>
6852       <div class="body">
6853         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6854 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
6855 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
6856 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
6857 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
6858 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
6859 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
6860 program.</p>
6861
6862 <!-- 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 -->
6863
6864 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
6865 <p>
6866 <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>
6867 <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>
6868 <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>
6869 <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>
6870 <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>
6871 <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>
6872 <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>
6873 <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>
6874 <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>
6875 <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>
6876 <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>
6877 <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>
6878 <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>
6879 <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>
6880 </p>
6881
6882 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
6883 <p>
6884 <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>
6885 <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>
6886 <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>
6887 <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>
6888 <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>
6889 <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>
6890 </p>
6891
6892 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
6893 <p>
6894 <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>
6895 </p>
6896
6897 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
6898 <p>
6899 <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>
6900 <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>
6901 <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>
6902 <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>
6903 <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>
6904 <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>
6905 <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>
6906 <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>
6907 <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>
6908 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
6909 <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>
6910 </p>
6911
6912 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
6913 <p>
6914 <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>
6915 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
6916 </p>
6917
6918 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
6919 <p>
6920 <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>
6921 <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>
6922 <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>
6923 </p>
6924
6925 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
6926 <p>
6927 <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>
6928 <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>
6929 <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>
6930 <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>
6931 <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>
6932 </p>
6933
6934 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
6935 <p>
6936 <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>
6937 <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>
6938 <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>
6939 <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>
6940 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
6941 <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>
6942 <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>
6943 <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>
6944 <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>
6945 <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>
6946 <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>
6947 <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>
6948 <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>
6949 <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>
6950 <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>
6951 <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>
6952 <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>
6953 </p>
6954
6955 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
6956 <p>
6957 <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>
6958 <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>
6959 </p>
6960
6961 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
6962 <p>
6963 <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>
6964 <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>
6965 <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>
6966 <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>
6967 <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>
6968 <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>
6969 <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>
6970 <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>
6971 <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>
6972 <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>
6973 </p>
6974
6975 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
6976 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
6977 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
6978 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
6979 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
6980 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
6981 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
6982
6983       </div>
6984       <div class="tags">
6985
6986
6987         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>.
6988
6989
6990       </div>
6991     </div>
6992     <div class="padding"></div>
6993
6994     <div class="entry">
6995       <div class="title">
6996         <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>
6997       </div>
6998       <div class="date">
6999         27th May 2013
7000       </div>
7001       <div class="body">
7002         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7003 <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
7004 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7005 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7006 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7007 and Windows 8.</p>
7008
7009 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7010 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7011 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7012 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7013 enough to tell.</p>
7014
7015 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7016 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7017 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7018 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7019 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7020 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7021 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7022 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7023 to follow.</p>
7024
7025 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7026 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7027 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7028 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7029 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7030 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7031 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7032 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7033
7034 <p>I've updated the
7035 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7036 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7037 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7038 machine.</p>
7039
7040 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7041 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7042
7043       </div>
7044       <div class="tags">
7045
7046
7047         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>.
7048
7049
7050       </div>
7051     </div>
7052     <div class="padding"></div>
7053
7054     <div class="entry">
7055       <div class="title">
7056         <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>
7057       </div>
7058       <div class="date">
7059         25th May 2013
7060       </div>
7061       <div class="body">
7062         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7063 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7064 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7065 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7066 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7067 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7068
7069 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7070 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7071 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7072 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7073 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7074 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7075 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7076 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7077 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7078 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7079
7080 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7081 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7082 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7083 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7084 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7085 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7086
7087 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7088 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7089 on new Laptops?</p>
7090
7091       </div>
7092       <div class="tags">
7093
7094
7095         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>.
7096
7097
7098       </div>
7099     </div>
7100     <div class="padding"></div>
7101
7102     <div class="entry">
7103       <div class="title">
7104         <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>
7105       </div>
7106       <div class="date">
7107         17th May 2013
7108       </div>
7109       <div class="body">
7110         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7111 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7112 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7113 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7114 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7115 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7116 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7117 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7118 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7119 donate some money</a>.
7120
7121 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7122 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7123 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7124 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7125 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7126
7127 <p>The script,
7128 <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/>
7129 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7130 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7131 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7132
7133 <ol>
7134
7135 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7136 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7137 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7138     our configuration.</li>
7139 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7140     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7141     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7142     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7143 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7144     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7145 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7146
7147 </ol>
7148
7149 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7150 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7151 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7152 the needed packages.</p>
7153
7154 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7155 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7156 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7157 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7158 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7159 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7160
7161 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7162 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7163 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7164
7165 <p><pre>
7166 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7167 DESKTOP="lxde"
7168 </pre></p>
7169
7170 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7171 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7172 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7173 boot.</p>
7174
7175       </div>
7176       <div class="tags">
7177
7178
7179         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>.
7180
7181
7182       </div>
7183     </div>
7184     <div class="padding"></div>
7185
7186     <div class="entry">
7187       <div class="title">
7188         <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>
7189       </div>
7190       <div class="date">
7191         14th May 2013
7192       </div>
7193       <div class="body">
7194         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7195 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
7196 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
7197
7198 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
7199 2013-05-14</strong></p>
7200
7201 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
7202 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
7203 codename "Wheezy".</p>
7204
7205 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7206
7207 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
7208 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7209 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
7210 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7211 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7212 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7213 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
7214 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
7215
7216 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
7217 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
7218 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
7219
7220 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7221 <ul>
7222   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
7223     default.</li>
7224   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
7225   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
7226   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
7227     ibus-anthy.</li>
7228 </ul>
7229
7230 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7231 <ul>
7232
7233   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
7234     reliability improvements.</li>
7235   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
7236     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
7237   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
7238     problems.</li>
7239   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
7240     direct:// URL.</li>
7241   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
7242   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
7243   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
7244   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
7245     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
7246   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
7247     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
7248 </ul>
7249
7250 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7251 <ul>
7252
7253   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
7254     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
7255     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
7256   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
7257   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
7258     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
7259   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
7260   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
7261   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
7262     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
7263   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
7264     password submission problem
7265     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
7266
7267 </ul>
7268
7269 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7270
7271 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7272 <ul>
7273
7274   <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>
7275   <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>
7276   <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>
7277
7278 </ul>
7279
7280 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
7281
7282 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
7283
7284 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7285
7286 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
7287
7288       </div>
7289       <div class="tags">
7290
7291
7292         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>.
7293
7294
7295       </div>
7296     </div>
7297     <div class="padding"></div>
7298
7299     <div class="entry">
7300       <div class="title">
7301         <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>
7302       </div>
7303       <div class="date">
7304         11th May 2013
7305       </div>
7306       <div class="body">
7307         <P>In January,
7308 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7309 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7310 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7311 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7312 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7313 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7314 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7315 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7316 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7317 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7318 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7319 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7320
7321 <p><table>
7322 <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>
7323 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7324 <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>
7325 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7326 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7327 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7328 <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>
7329 <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>
7330 <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>
7331 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7332 </table></p>
7333
7334 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7335 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7336 available in experimental.</p>
7337
7338 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7339 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7340 for LEGO designers.</p>
7341
7342       </div>
7343       <div class="tags">
7344
7345
7346         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>.
7347
7348
7349       </div>
7350     </div>
7351     <div class="padding"></div>
7352
7353     <div class="entry">
7354       <div class="title">
7355         <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>
7356       </div>
7357       <div class="date">
7358          5th May 2013
7359       </div>
7360       <div class="body">
7361         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7362 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7363 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7364 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7365 soon.</p>
7366
7367 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7368 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7369 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7370 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7371 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7372 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7373 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7374 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7375 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7376 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7377 Edu.</a>
7378
7379 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7380 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7381 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7382 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7383 follow.<p>
7384
7385       </div>
7386       <div class="tags">
7387
7388
7389         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>.
7390
7391
7392       </div>
7393     </div>
7394     <div class="padding"></div>
7395
7396     <div class="entry">
7397       <div class="title">
7398         <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>
7399       </div>
7400       <div class="date">
7401         26th April 2013
7402       </div>
7403       <div class="body">
7404         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
7405 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
7406 announcement:</p>
7407
7408 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
7409 2013-04-26</strong></p>
7410
7411 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
7412 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
7413
7414 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7415
7416 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
7417 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
7418 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
7419 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
7420 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
7421 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
7422 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
7423 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
7424 installed via the network.</p>
7425
7426 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
7427 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
7428 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
7429
7430 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7431
7432 <ul>
7433 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
7434   <ul>
7435      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
7436      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
7437          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
7438          manual.)</li>
7439      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
7440      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
7441      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
7442      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
7443      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
7444      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
7445      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
7446      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
7447      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
7448      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
7449      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
7450      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
7451          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
7452          manual</a> for more details.</li>
7453      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
7454          installation.</li>
7455      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
7456          <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>
7457   </ul></li>
7458 </ul>
7459
7460 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
7461 <ul>
7462 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
7463     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
7464     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
7465 </ul>
7466
7467 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
7468 <ul>
7469 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
7470     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
7471     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
7472 </ul>
7473
7474 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7475 <ul>
7476 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
7477     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
7478     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
7479 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
7480     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
7481     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
7482 </ul>
7483
7484 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
7485 <ul>
7486 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
7487     yet.</li>
7488 </ul>
7489
7490 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
7491
7492 <ul>
7493 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
7494     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
7495     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
7496 </ul>
7497
7498 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7499
7500 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
7501 <ul>
7502 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
7503 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
7504 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
7505 </ul>
7506
7507 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
7508
7509 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
7510
7511 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7512
7513 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
7514
7515       </div>
7516       <div class="tags">
7517
7518
7519         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>.
7520
7521
7522       </div>
7523     </div>
7524     <div class="padding"></div>
7525
7526     <div class="entry">
7527       <div class="title">
7528         <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>
7529       </div>
7530       <div class="date">
7531         16th April 2013
7532       </div>
7533       <div class="body">
7534         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
7535 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
7536 Details about the gathering can be found
7537 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
7538 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
7539 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
7540 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
7541 weekend.</p>
7542
7543 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
7544 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
7545 Edu release.</p>
7546
7547 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
7548
7549       </div>
7550       <div class="tags">
7551
7552
7553         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>.
7554
7555
7556       </div>
7557     </div>
7558     <div class="padding"></div>
7559
7560     <div class="entry">
7561       <div class="title">
7562         <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>
7563       </div>
7564       <div class="date">
7565          3rd April 2013
7566       </div>
7567       <div class="body">
7568         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
7569 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
7570 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
7571 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
7572
7573 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
7574 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
7575 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
7576 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
7577 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
7578 BTS. :)</p>
7579
7580       </div>
7581       <div class="tags">
7582
7583
7584         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>.
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/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>
7594       </div>
7595       <div class="date">
7596         26th March 2013
7597       </div>
7598       <div class="body">
7599         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
7600 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
7601 font you use when printing.</p>
7602
7603 <p>Three years ago,
7604 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
7605 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
7606 changed their default front from
7607 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
7608 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
7609 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
7610 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
7611 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
7612 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
7613 prints.</p>
7614
7615 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
7616 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
7617 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
7618 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
7619 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
7620 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
7621 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
7622 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
7623 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
7624 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
7625 depend on the documents printed.</p>
7626
7627 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
7628 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
7629 and save some money in the process.</p>
7630
7631 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
7632 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
7633 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
7634 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
7635 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
7636 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
7637 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
7638 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
7639 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
7640
7641       </div>
7642       <div class="tags">
7643
7644
7645         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7646
7647
7648       </div>
7649     </div>
7650     <div class="padding"></div>
7651
7652     <div class="entry">
7653       <div class="title">
7654         <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>
7655       </div>
7656       <div class="date">
7657         24th March 2013
7658       </div>
7659       <div class="body">
7660         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
7661 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
7662 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
7663 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
7664 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
7665 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
7666 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
7667 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
7668 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
7669 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
7670 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
7671 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
7672
7673 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
7674 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
7675 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
7676 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
7677 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
7678 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
7679 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
7680 all I had to do was to use the
7681 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
7682 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
7683 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
7684 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
7685 xsltproc/fop (aka
7686 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
7687 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
7688 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
7689 technical detail.</p>
7690
7691 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
7692 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
7693 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
7694 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
7695 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
7696 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
7697
7698 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
7699 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
7700 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
7701 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
7702 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
7703 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
7704 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
7705 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
7706 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
7707
7708 <p><blockquote><pre>
7709 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7710 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7711   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
7712     &lt;hr/&gt;
7713   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7714 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7715 </pre></blockquote></p>
7716
7717 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
7718
7719 <p><blockquote><pre>
7720 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7721 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7722   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
7723     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
7724       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
7725     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
7726   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7727 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7728 </pre></blockquote></p>
7729
7730 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
7731 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
7732 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
7733 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
7734 enough.</p>
7735
7736 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
7737 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
7738 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
7739 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
7740 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
7741 look like this:</p>
7742
7743 <p><blockquote><pre>
7744 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7745 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
7746   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
7747     &lt;br/&gt;
7748   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7749 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7750 </pre></blockquote></p>
7751
7752 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
7753
7754 <p><blockquote><pre>
7755 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
7756 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
7757   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
7758   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
7759     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
7760   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
7761 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
7762 </pre></blockquote></p>
7763
7764 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
7765 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
7766 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
7767 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
7768 page.</p>
7769
7770 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
7771 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
7772 github</a>
7773 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
7774 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
7775 days.</p>
7776
7777       </div>
7778       <div class="tags">
7779
7780
7781         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>.
7782
7783
7784       </div>
7785     </div>
7786     <div class="padding"></div>
7787
7788     <div class="entry">
7789       <div class="title">
7790         <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>
7791       </div>
7792       <div class="date">
7793         17th March 2013
7794       </div>
7795       <div class="body">
7796         <p>Via
7797 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
7798 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
7799 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
7800 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
7801 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
7802 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
7803 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
7804
7805 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
7806 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
7807
7808 <blockquote>
7809 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
7810 </blockquote>
7811
7812 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
7813
7814 <blockquote>
7815 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
7816 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
7817 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
7818 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
7819 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
7820 </blockquote>
7821
7822 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
7823 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
7824 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
7825 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
7826
7827 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
7828 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
7829
7830 <blockquote>
7831 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
7832 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
7833 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
7834 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
7835 </blockquote>
7836
7837 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
7838 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
7839 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
7840 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
7841 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
7842
7843 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
7844 embedding:</p>
7845
7846 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
7847
7848       </div>
7849       <div class="tags">
7850
7851
7852         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>.
7853
7854
7855       </div>
7856     </div>
7857     <div class="padding"></div>
7858
7859     <div class="entry">
7860       <div class="title">
7861         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
7862       </div>
7863       <div class="date">
7864          8th March 2013
7865       </div>
7866       <div class="body">
7867         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
7868 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
7869 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
7870 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
7871 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
7872 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
7873 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
7874
7875 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
7876
7877 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
7878 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
7879
7880 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
7881 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
7882 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
7883 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
7884 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
7885 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
7886
7887 <p>Images are available for download at
7888 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
7889
7890 <p>md5sums:
7891 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
7892 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
7893 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
7894
7895 <p>sha1sums:
7896 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
7897 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
7898 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
7899
7900 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
7901
7902 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
7903 2013-03-03:</p>
7904
7905 <ul>
7906   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
7907   <ul>
7908         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
7909         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
7910   </ul></li>
7911   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
7912   <ul>
7913         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
7914         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
7915   </ul></li>
7916   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
7917      <ul>
7918         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
7919         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
7920         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
7921                 Closes: #664596</li>
7922         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
7923                 Closes: #664976</li>
7924         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
7925            <ul>
7926                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
7927                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
7928            </ul></li>
7929         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
7930            <ul>
7931                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
7932                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
7933                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
7934                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
7935                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
7936            </ul></li>
7937         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
7938     </ul>
7939   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
7940     <ul>
7941         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
7942     </ul></li>
7943 </ul>
7944
7945 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
7946 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
7947 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
7948 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
7949
7950 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
7951 mailinglist
7952 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
7953 </p></blockquote>
7954
7955 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
7956
7957       </div>
7958       <div class="tags">
7959
7960
7961         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>.
7962
7963
7964       </div>
7965     </div>
7966     <div class="padding"></div>
7967
7968     <div class="entry">
7969       <div class="title">
7970         <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>
7971       </div>
7972       <div class="date">
7973          3rd March 2013
7974       </div>
7975       <div class="body">
7976         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
7977 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
7978 support using
7979 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
7980 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
7981 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
7982 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
7983 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
7984 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
7985 using the GNU LGPL, and
7986 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
7987
7988 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
7989 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
7990 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
7991 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
7992 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
7993 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
7994
7995 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
7996 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
7997 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
7998 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
7999 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
8000 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
8001 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
8002 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
8003 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
8004 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
8005 signal distribution is handled using
8006 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
8007 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
8008 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
8009 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
8010 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
8011 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
8012 them up a bit more first.</p>
8013
8014 <p>The development is coordinated on the
8015 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
8016 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
8017 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
8018 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
8019 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
8020 development.</p>
8021
8022       </div>
8023       <div class="tags">
8024
8025
8026         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>.
8027
8028
8029       </div>
8030     </div>
8031     <div class="padding"></div>
8032
8033     <div class="entry">
8034       <div class="title">
8035         <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>
8036       </div>
8037       <div class="date">
8038         27th February 2013
8039       </div>
8040       <div class="body">
8041         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
8042 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
8043 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
8044 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
8045 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
8046 (where I am the chair of the board) and
8047 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
8048 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
8049 GNU», with this description:
8050
8051 <p><blockquote>
8052 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
8053 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
8054 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
8055 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
8056 </blockquote></p>
8057
8058 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
8059 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
8060 am really curious how many will show up.  See
8061 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
8062 page</a> for the location details.</p>
8063
8064       </div>
8065       <div class="tags">
8066
8067
8068         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>.
8069
8070
8071       </div>
8072     </div>
8073     <div class="padding"></div>
8074
8075     <div class="entry">
8076       <div class="title">
8077         <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>
8078       </div>
8079       <div class="date">
8080         15th February 2013
8081       </div>
8082       <div class="body">
8083         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
8084 now a great source of free maps available from
8085 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
8086 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
8087 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
8088 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
8089 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
8090 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
8091 page for descriptions).</p>
8092
8093 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
8094 map you can just edit the
8095 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
8096 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
8097
8098       </div>
8099       <div class="tags">
8100
8101
8102         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>.
8103
8104
8105       </div>
8106     </div>
8107     <div class="padding"></div>
8108
8109     <div class="entry">
8110       <div class="title">
8111         <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>
8112       </div>
8113       <div class="date">
8114         12th February 2013
8115       </div>
8116       <div class="body">
8117         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
8118 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
8119 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
8120 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
8121 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
8122 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
8123 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
8124 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
8125 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
8126 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
8127 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
8128 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
8129 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
8130 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
8131 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
8132 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
8133
8134 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
8135 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
8136 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
8137 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
8138 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
8139 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
8140 fields:</p>
8141
8142 <p><pre>
8143 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
8144 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
8145 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
8146 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
8147 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
8148 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
8149 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
8150 </pre></p>
8151
8152 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
8153 answer regarding
8154 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
8155 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
8156 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
8157 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
8158
8159 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
8160
8161 <p><pre>
8162 BEGIN:VCARD
8163 VERSION:2.1
8164 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
8165 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
8166 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
8167 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
8168 REV:20130212T095000Z
8169 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
8170 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
8171 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
8172 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
8173 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
8174 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
8175 END:VCARD
8176 </pre></p>
8177
8178 <p>The resulting QR code created using
8179 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
8180 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
8181 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
8182 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
8183 system.</p>
8184
8185 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
8186
8187 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
8188 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
8189 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
8190 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
8191
8192 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
8193 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
8194
8195       </div>
8196       <div class="tags">
8197
8198
8199         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>.
8200
8201
8202       </div>
8203     </div>
8204     <div class="padding"></div>
8205
8206     <div class="entry">
8207       <div class="title">
8208         <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>
8209       </div>
8210       <div class="date">
8211         10th February 2013
8212       </div>
8213       <div class="body">
8214         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
8215
8216 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
8217 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
8218 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
8219 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
8220 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
8221 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
8222 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
8223 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
8224 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
8225 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
8226 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
8227
8228 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
8229 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
8230 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
8231 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
8232 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
8233 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
8234 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
8235 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
8236 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
8237 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
8238 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
8239 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
8240 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
8241 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
8242 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
8243 ones own
8244 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
8245 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
8246 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
8247 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
8248 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
8249 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
8250 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
8251 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
8252 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
8253 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
8254 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
8255
8256 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
8257 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
8258 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
8259 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
8260 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
8261 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
8262
8263 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
8264 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
8265 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
8266
8267       </div>
8268       <div class="tags">
8269
8270
8271         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8272
8273
8274       </div>
8275     </div>
8276     <div class="padding"></div>
8277
8278     <div class="entry">
8279       <div class="title">
8280         <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>
8281       </div>
8282       <div class="date">
8283          2nd February 2013
8284       </div>
8285       <div class="body">
8286         <p>My
8287 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
8288 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
8289 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
8290 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
8291 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
8292 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
8293 version too.</p>
8294
8295 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
8296 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
8297 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
8298 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
8299 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
8300 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
8301 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
8302 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
8303
8304 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
8305 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
8306 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
8307 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
8308 it. :)</p>
8309
8310 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8311 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8312 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8313
8314       </div>
8315       <div class="tags">
8316
8317
8318         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>.
8319
8320
8321       </div>
8322     </div>
8323     <div class="padding"></div>
8324
8325     <div class="entry">
8326       <div class="title">
8327         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
8328       </div>
8329       <div class="date">
8330         22nd January 2013
8331       </div>
8332       <div class="body">
8333         <p>Yesterday, I
8334 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
8335 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
8336 pluggable hardware devices, which I
8337 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
8338 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
8339 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
8340 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
8341 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
8342 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
8343 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
8344 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
8345 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
8346 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
8347
8348 <pre>
8349 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
8350 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
8351 </pre>
8352
8353 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
8354 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
8355 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
8356 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
8357
8358 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
8359 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
8360 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
8361 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
8362 word.</p>
8363
8364 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
8365 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
8366 process.</p>
8367
8368 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
8369 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
8370
8371       </div>
8372       <div class="tags">
8373
8374
8375         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>.
8376
8377
8378       </div>
8379     </div>
8380     <div class="padding"></div>
8381
8382     <div class="entry">
8383       <div class="title">
8384         <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>
8385       </div>
8386       <div class="date">
8387         21st January 2013
8388       </div>
8389       <div class="body">
8390         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
8391 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
8392 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
8393 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
8394 it, fetch the
8395 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
8396 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
8397 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
8398 autostart script.</p>
8399
8400 <p>The design is simple:</p>
8401
8402 <ul>
8403
8404 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
8405 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
8406
8407 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
8408 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
8409 initially did.</li>
8410
8411 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
8412 the APT database, a database
8413 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
8414 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
8415
8416 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
8417 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
8418 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
8419 package or packages.</li>
8420
8421 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
8422 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
8423
8424 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
8425 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
8426
8427 </ul>
8428
8429 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
8430 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
8431 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
8432 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
8433
8434 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
8435 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
8436 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
8437 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
8438 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
8439
8440 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
8441 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
8442 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
8443 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
8444 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
8445 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
8446 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
8447 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
8448
8449 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
8450 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
8451 '<tt>svn checkout
8452 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
8453 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
8454 devscripts package.</p>
8455
8456 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
8457 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
8458 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
8459 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
8460 instructions</a> for details.</p>
8461
8462       </div>
8463       <div class="tags">
8464
8465
8466         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>.
8467
8468
8469       </div>
8470     </div>
8471     <div class="padding"></div>
8472
8473     <div class="entry">
8474       <div class="title">
8475         <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>
8476       </div>
8477       <div class="date">
8478         19th January 2013
8479       </div>
8480       <div class="body">
8481         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
8482 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
8483 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
8484 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
8485 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
8486 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
8487 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
8488 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
8489 not a durable solution.
8490
8491 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
8492 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
8493
8494 <ul>
8495
8496 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
8497   than A4).</li>
8498 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
8499 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
8500 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
8501 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
8502 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
8503 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
8504 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
8505 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
8506 size).</li>
8507 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
8508   X.org packages.</li>
8509 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
8510   the time).
8511
8512 </ul>
8513
8514 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
8515 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
8516 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
8517 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
8518 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
8519 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
8520 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
8521 still be useful.</p>
8522
8523 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
8524 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
8525 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
8526 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
8527 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
8528 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
8529
8530       </div>
8531       <div class="tags">
8532
8533
8534         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>.
8535
8536
8537       </div>
8538     </div>
8539     <div class="padding"></div>
8540
8541     <div class="entry">
8542       <div class="title">
8543         <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>
8544       </div>
8545       <div class="date">
8546         18th January 2013
8547       </div>
8548       <div class="body">
8549         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
8550 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
8551 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
8552 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
8553 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
8554 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
8555 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
8556
8557 <pre>
8558 #!/usr/bin/python
8559 import sys
8560 import apt
8561 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8562     cache = apt.Cache()
8563     cache.open(None)
8564     thepkgs = []
8565     for pkg in cache:
8566         version = pkg.candidate
8567         if version is None:
8568             version = pkg.installed
8569         if version is None:
8570             continue
8571         record = version.record
8572         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
8573             continue
8574         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
8575         for t in mime_types:
8576             t = t.rstrip().strip()
8577             if t == mimetype:
8578                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
8579     return thepkgs
8580 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
8581 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
8582     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
8583 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
8584 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8585     print "  %s" %pkg
8586 </pre>
8587
8588 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
8589
8590 <pre>
8591 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
8592 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
8593   gecko-mediaplayer
8594 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
8595 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
8596   browser-plugin-gnash
8597 %
8598 </pre>
8599
8600 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
8601 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
8602 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
8603 anyone working on adding it?</p>
8604
8605 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
8606 request for icweasel support for this feature is
8607 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
8608 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
8609 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
8610 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
8611
8612       </div>
8613       <div class="tags">
8614
8615
8616         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>.
8617
8618
8619       </div>
8620     </div>
8621     <div class="padding"></div>
8622
8623     <div class="entry">
8624       <div class="title">
8625         <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>
8626       </div>
8627       <div class="date">
8628         16th January 2013
8629       </div>
8630       <div class="body">
8631         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
8632 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
8633 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
8634 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
8635 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
8636 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
8637 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
8638 downloaded by the browser.</p>
8639
8640 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
8641 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
8642 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
8643 can be found on the
8644 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
8645 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
8646 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
8647 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
8648 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
8649
8650 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
8651
8652 <pre>
8653   count MIME type
8654   ----- -----------------------
8655      32 text/plain
8656      30 audio/mpeg
8657      29 image/png
8658      28 image/jpeg
8659      27 application/ogg
8660      26 audio/x-mp3
8661      25 image/tiff
8662      25 image/gif
8663      22 image/bmp
8664      22 audio/x-wav
8665      20 audio/x-flac
8666      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8667      18 video/x-ms-asf
8668      18 audio/x-musepack
8669      18 audio/x-mpeg
8670      18 application/x-ogg
8671      17 video/mpeg
8672      17 audio/x-scpls
8673      17 audio/ogg
8674      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8675 </pre>
8676
8677 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
8678
8679 <pre>
8680   count MIME type
8681   ----- -----------------------
8682      33 text/plain
8683      32 image/png
8684      32 image/jpeg
8685      29 audio/mpeg
8686      27 image/gif
8687      26 image/tiff
8688      26 application/ogg
8689      25 audio/x-mp3
8690      22 image/bmp
8691      21 audio/x-wav
8692      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8693      19 audio/x-mpeg
8694      18 video/mpeg
8695      18 audio/x-scpls
8696      18 audio/x-flac
8697      18 application/x-ogg
8698      17 video/x-ms-asf
8699      17 text/html
8700      17 audio/x-musepack
8701      16 image/x-xbitmap
8702 </pre>
8703
8704 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
8705
8706 <pre>
8707   count MIME type
8708   ----- -----------------------
8709      31 text/plain
8710      31 image/png
8711      31 image/jpeg
8712      29 audio/mpeg
8713      28 application/ogg
8714      27 image/gif
8715      26 image/tiff
8716      26 audio/x-mp3
8717      23 audio/x-wav
8718      22 image/bmp
8719      21 audio/x-flac
8720      20 audio/x-mpegurl
8721      19 audio/x-mpeg
8722      18 video/x-ms-asf
8723      18 video/mpeg
8724      18 audio/x-scpls
8725      18 application/x-ogg
8726      17 audio/x-musepack
8727      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8728      16 video/x-msvideo
8729 </pre>
8730
8731 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
8732 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
8733 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
8734 issues.</p>
8735
8736 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
8737 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
8738
8739       </div>
8740       <div class="tags">
8741
8742
8743         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>.
8744
8745
8746       </div>
8747     </div>
8748     <div class="padding"></div>
8749
8750     <div class="entry">
8751       <div class="title">
8752         <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>
8753       </div>
8754       <div class="date">
8755         15th January 2013
8756       </div>
8757       <div class="body">
8758         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
8759 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
8760 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
8761 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
8762 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
8763 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
8764 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
8765 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
8766 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
8767 packages.</p>
8768
8769 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
8770 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
8771 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
8772 modalias.</p>
8773
8774 <p><blockquote>
8775 Package: package-name
8776 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
8777 </blockquote></p>
8778
8779 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
8780 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
8781
8782 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
8783 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
8784
8785 <p><blockquote>
8786 Package: cheese
8787 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
8788 </blockquote></p>
8789
8790 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
8791 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
8792
8793 <p><blockquote>
8794 Package: pcmciautils
8795 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
8796 </blockquote></p>
8797
8798 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
8799 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
8800
8801 <p><blockquote>
8802 Package: colorhug-client
8803 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
8804 </blockquote></p>
8805
8806 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
8807 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
8808 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
8809
8810 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
8811 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
8812 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
8813 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
8814 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
8815 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
8816 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
8817 Raring.</p>
8818
8819 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
8820 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
8821 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
8822 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
8823 try the
8824 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
8825 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
8826 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
8827 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
8828
8829 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
8830 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
8831
8832 <p><blockquote>
8833 % ./hw-support-lookup
8834 <br>yubikey-personalization
8835 <br>%
8836 </blockquote></p>
8837
8838 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
8839 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
8840
8841 <p><blockquote>
8842 % ./hw-support-lookup
8843 <br>pcmciautils
8844 <br>%
8845 </blockquote></p>
8846
8847 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
8848 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
8849 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
8850
8851 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
8852 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
8853 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
8854 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
8855 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
8856 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
8857 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
8858 see if it work.</p>
8859
8860 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8861 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8862 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8863 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8864
8865       </div>
8866       <div class="tags">
8867
8868
8869         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>.
8870
8871
8872       </div>
8873     </div>
8874     <div class="padding"></div>
8875
8876     <div class="entry">
8877       <div class="title">
8878         <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>
8879       </div>
8880       <div class="date">
8881         14th January 2013
8882       </div>
8883       <div class="body">
8884         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
8885 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
8886 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
8887 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
8888 in
8889 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8890 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
8891
8892 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
8893
8894 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
8895 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
8896 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
8897 &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;,
8898 &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
8899 &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;.
8900
8901 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
8902 this shell script:</p>
8903
8904 <pre>
8905 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
8906 </pre>
8907
8908 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
8909 using modinfo:</p>
8910
8911 <pre>
8912 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
8913 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
8914 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
8915 %
8916 </pre>
8917
8918 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
8919
8920 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
8921 Bridge memory controller:</p>
8922
8923 <p><blockquote>
8924 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
8925 </blockquote></p>
8926
8927 <p>This represent these values:</p>
8928
8929 <pre>
8930  v   00008086  (vendor)
8931  d   00002770  (device)
8932  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
8933  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
8934  bc  06        (bus class)
8935  sc  00        (bus subclass)
8936  i   00        (interface)
8937 </pre>
8938
8939 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
8940 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
8941 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
8942 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
8943
8944 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
8945 means.</p>
8946
8947 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
8948
8949 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
8950 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
8951
8952 <p><blockquote>
8953 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
8954 </blockquote></p>
8955
8956 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
8957
8958 <pre>
8959  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
8960  p    0001  (device product)
8961  d    0206  (bcddevice)
8962  dc     09  (device class)
8963  dsc    00  (device subclass)
8964  dp     00  (device protocol)
8965  ic     09  (interface class)
8966  isc    00  (interface subclass)
8967  ip     00  (interface protocol)
8968 </pre>
8969
8970 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
8971 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
8972 these alias entries show up:</p>
8973
8974 <p><blockquote>
8975 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
8976 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
8977 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
8978 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
8979 </blockquote></p>
8980
8981 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
8982 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
8983 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
8984
8985 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
8986
8987 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
8988 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
8989
8990 <p><blockquote>
8991 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8992 </blockquote></p>
8993
8994 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
8995
8996 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
8997
8998 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
8999 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
9000 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
9001
9002 <p><blockquote>
9003 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
9004 </blockquote></p>
9005
9006 <p>The values present are</p>
9007
9008 <pre>
9009  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
9010  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
9011  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
9012  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
9013  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
9014  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
9015  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
9016  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
9017  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
9018  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
9019  ct   10             (chassis type)
9020  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
9021 </pre>
9022
9023 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
9024 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
9025
9026 <pre>
9027   3 Desktop
9028   4 Low Profile Desktop
9029   5 Pizza Box
9030   6 Mini Tower
9031   7 Tower
9032   8 Portable
9033   9 Laptop
9034  10 Notebook
9035  11 Hand Held
9036  12 Docking Station
9037  13 All In One
9038  14 Sub Notebook
9039  15 Space-saving
9040  16 Lunch Box
9041  17 Main Server Chassis
9042  18 Expansion Chassis
9043  19 Sub Chassis
9044  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
9045  21 Peripheral Chassis
9046  22 RAID Chassis
9047  23 Rack Mount Chassis
9048  24 Sealed-case PC
9049  25 Multi-system
9050  26 CompactPCI
9051  27 AdvancedTCA
9052  28 Blade
9053  29 Blade Enclosing
9054 </pre>
9055
9056 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
9057 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
9058 claim it is a desktop.</p>
9059
9060 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
9061
9062 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
9063 test machine:</p>
9064
9065 <p><blockquote>
9066 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
9067 </blockquote></p>
9068
9069 <p>The values present are</p>
9070
9071 <pre>
9072   ty  01  (type)
9073   pr  00  (prototype)
9074   id  00  (id)
9075   ex  00  (extra)
9076 </pre>
9077
9078 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
9079 the valid values are.</p>
9080
9081 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
9082
9083 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
9084 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
9085 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
9086 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
9087 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
9088 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
9089 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
9090
9091 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
9092
9093 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
9094 one can use the following shell script:</p>
9095
9096 <pre>
9097   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
9098     echo "$id" ; \
9099     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
9100   done
9101 </pre>
9102
9103 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
9104 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
9105
9106 <pre>
9107   acpi:ACPI0003:
9108     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
9109   acpi:device:
9110   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
9111   acpi:IBM0068:
9112     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
9113     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
9114     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
9115     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
9116   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
9117     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
9118     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
9119     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
9120   [...]
9121 </pre>
9122
9123 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
9124 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
9125 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
9126 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
9127
9128 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
9129 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
9130 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
9131
9132       </div>
9133       <div class="tags">
9134
9135
9136         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>.
9137
9138
9139       </div>
9140     </div>
9141     <div class="padding"></div>
9142
9143     <div class="entry">
9144       <div class="title">
9145         <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>
9146       </div>
9147       <div class="date">
9148         10th January 2013
9149       </div>
9150       <div class="body">
9151         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
9152 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
9153 Launcher and updated the Debian package
9154 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
9155 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
9156 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
9157 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
9158 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
9159 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
9160 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
9161 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
9162 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
9163 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
9164 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
9165 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
9166 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
9167 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
9168 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
9169
9170       </div>
9171       <div class="tags">
9172
9173
9174         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>.
9175
9176
9177       </div>
9178     </div>
9179     <div class="padding"></div>
9180
9181     <div class="entry">
9182       <div class="title">
9183         <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>
9184       </div>
9185       <div class="date">
9186          9th January 2013
9187       </div>
9188       <div class="body">
9189         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
9190 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
9191 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
9192 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
9193 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
9194 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
9195 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
9196 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
9197 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
9198 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
9199 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
9200
9201 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
9202 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
9203 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
9204 simple:
9205
9206 <ul>
9207
9208 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
9209   starting when a user log in.</li>
9210
9211 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
9212   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
9213
9214 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
9215   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
9216   packages.</li>
9217
9218 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
9219   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
9220
9221 </ul>
9222
9223 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
9224 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
9225 discover database to find packages and
9226 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
9227 packages.</p>
9228
9229 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
9230 draft package is now checked into
9231 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
9232 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
9233 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
9234 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
9235 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
9236 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
9237 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
9238 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
9239 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
9240 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
9241 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
9242 because of the freeze).</p>
9243
9244 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
9245 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
9246 inserted):</p>
9247
9248 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
9249
9250 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
9251 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
9252 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
9253
9254 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
9255 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
9256 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
9257 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
9258 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
9259 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
9260 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
9261
9262 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
9263 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
9264 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
9265 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
9266 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
9267 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
9268 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
9269 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
9270 not be installed?</p>
9271
9272 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
9273 please send me an email. :)</p>
9274
9275       </div>
9276       <div class="tags">
9277
9278
9279         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>.
9280
9281
9282       </div>
9283     </div>
9284     <div class="padding"></div>
9285
9286     <div class="entry">
9287       <div class="title">
9288         <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>
9289       </div>
9290       <div class="date">
9291          2nd January 2013
9292       </div>
9293       <div class="body">
9294         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
9295 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
9296 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
9297 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
9298 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
9299 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
9300 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
9301 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
9302 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
9303 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
9304
9305 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
9306 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
9307 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
9308
9309       </div>
9310       <div class="tags">
9311
9312
9313         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>.
9314
9315
9316       </div>
9317     </div>
9318     <div class="padding"></div>
9319
9320     <div class="entry">
9321       <div class="title">
9322         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
9323       </div>
9324       <div class="date">
9325         28th December 2012
9326       </div>
9327       <div class="body">
9328         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
9329 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
9330 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
9331 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
9332 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
9333 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
9334 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
9335 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
9336 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
9337 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
9338 followed by many others. :)</p>
9339
9340 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
9341 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
9342 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
9343 you want to donate to the project.</p>
9344
9345       </div>
9346       <div class="tags">
9347
9348
9349         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>.
9350
9351
9352       </div>
9353     </div>
9354     <div class="padding"></div>
9355
9356     <div class="entry">
9357       <div class="title">
9358         <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>
9359       </div>
9360       <div class="date">
9361         25th December 2012
9362       </div>
9363       <div class="body">
9364         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
9365 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
9366
9367 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
9368 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
9369 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
9370 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
9371 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
9372 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
9373 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
9374 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
9375 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
9376 name.</p>
9377
9378 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
9379 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
9380 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
9381
9382 <blockquote><pre>
9383 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
9384 cd bitcoin
9385 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
9386 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
9387 </pre></blockquote>
9388
9389 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
9390 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
9391 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
9392 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
9393 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
9394 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
9395 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
9396 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
9397 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
9398
9399 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9400 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9401 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9402
9403       </div>
9404       <div class="tags">
9405
9406
9407         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>.
9408
9409
9410       </div>
9411     </div>
9412     <div class="padding"></div>
9413
9414     <div class="entry">
9415       <div class="title">
9416         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
9417       </div>
9418       <div class="date">
9419         21st December 2012
9420       </div>
9421       <div class="body">
9422         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
9423 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
9424 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
9425 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
9426 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
9427 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
9428 is now maintained by a
9429 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
9430 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
9431 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
9432 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
9433 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
9434 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
9435 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
9436 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
9437 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
9438 Corallo in a
9439 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
9440 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
9441 Debian package.</p>
9442
9443 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
9444 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
9445 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
9446 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
9447 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
9448 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
9449 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
9450 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
9451 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
9452 new version to unstable.
9453
9454 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
9455 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
9456 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
9457 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
9458 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
9459 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
9460 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
9461 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
9462 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
9463 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
9464 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
9465 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
9466 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
9467 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
9468 have not tested them.</p>
9469
9470 <p>My
9471 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
9472 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
9473 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
9474 years ago, as can be
9475 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
9476 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
9477 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
9478 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
9479 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
9480 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
9481 the same address as last time,
9482 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9483
9484       </div>
9485       <div class="tags">
9486
9487
9488         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>.
9489
9490
9491       </div>
9492     </div>
9493     <div class="padding"></div>
9494
9495     <div class="entry">
9496       <div class="title">
9497         <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>
9498       </div>
9499       <div class="date">
9500         18th December 2012
9501       </div>
9502       <div class="body">
9503         <p>A few days ago I came across
9504 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
9505 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
9506 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
9507 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
9508 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
9509 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
9510 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
9511 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
9512 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
9513
9514 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
9515 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
9516 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
9517 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
9518
9519 <blockquote><pre>
9520 2004-05-27 Book Store
9521       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
9522       Liabilities:Visa
9523 </pre></blockquote>
9524
9525 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
9526 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
9527 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
9528 Spang</a>,
9529 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
9530 Keen</a>,
9531 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
9532 Cantino</a> and
9533 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
9534 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
9535 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
9536 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
9537 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
9538
9539 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
9540 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
9541 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
9542 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
9543 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
9544
9545 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
9546 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
9547 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
9548 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
9549 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
9550 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
9551 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
9552 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
9553 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
9554
9555       </div>
9556       <div class="tags">
9557
9558
9559         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>.
9560
9561
9562       </div>
9563     </div>
9564     <div class="padding"></div>
9565
9566     <div class="entry">
9567       <div class="title">
9568         <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>
9569       </div>
9570       <div class="date">
9571          6th December 2012
9572       </div>
9573       <div class="body">
9574         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
9575 Oslo</a>, we use the
9576 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
9577 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
9578 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
9579 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
9580 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
9581 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
9582 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
9583 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
9584 Python.</p>
9585
9586 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
9587 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
9588 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
9589 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
9590 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
9591 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
9592
9593 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
9594 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
9595 user currently logged in:</p>
9596
9597 <blockquote><pre>
9598 #!/usr/bin/env python
9599 import getpass
9600 import xmlrpclib
9601 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
9602 username = getpass.getuser()
9603 password = getpass.getpass()
9604 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
9605 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
9606 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
9607 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
9608 result = server.logout(sessionid)
9609 print result
9610 </pre></blockquote>
9611
9612 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
9613 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
9614
9615       </div>
9616       <div class="tags">
9617
9618
9619         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>.
9620
9621
9622       </div>
9623     </div>
9624     <div class="padding"></div>
9625
9626     <div class="entry">
9627       <div class="title">
9628         <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>
9629       </div>
9630       <div class="date">
9631         17th November 2012
9632       </div>
9633       <div class="body">
9634         <p>While working on a
9635 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
9636 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
9637 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
9638 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
9639 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
9640 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
9641
9642 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
9643 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
9644 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
9645 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
9646 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
9647 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
9648 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
9649 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
9650 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
9651 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
9652 arguments.</p>
9653
9654 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
9655 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
9656 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
9657 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
9658 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
9659 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
9660 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
9661 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
9662
9663 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
9664 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
9665 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
9666 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
9667 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
9668 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
9669 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
9670 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
9671 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
9672 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
9673 correct right holder.</p>
9674
9675 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
9676 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
9677 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
9678 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
9679 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
9680 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
9681 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
9682 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
9683 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
9684 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
9685 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
9686 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
9687 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
9688 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
9689
9690 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
9691 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
9692 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
9693
9694 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
9695 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
9696
9697       </div>
9698       <div class="tags">
9699
9700
9701         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>.
9702
9703
9704       </div>
9705     </div>
9706     <div class="padding"></div>
9707
9708     <div class="entry">
9709       <div class="title">
9710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
9711       </div>
9712       <div class="date">
9713         14th November 2012
9714       </div>
9715       <div class="body">
9716         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
9717 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
9718 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
9719 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
9720 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
9721 the people behind the German
9722 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
9723 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
9724 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
9725
9726 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9727
9728 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
9729 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
9730 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
9731
9732 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
9733 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
9734 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
9735 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
9736 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
9737 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
9738
9739 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
9740 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
9741 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
9742 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
9743 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
9744 relationship management and the communication processes in the
9745 project.</p>
9746
9747 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
9748 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
9749 and a yoga teacher.</p>
9750
9751 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9752 project?</strong></p>
9753
9754 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
9755
9756 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
9757 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
9758 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
9759 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
9760 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
9761 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
9762 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
9763 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
9764 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
9765 parents.</p>
9766
9767 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
9768 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
9769 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
9770 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
9771 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
9772 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
9773 Germany.</p>
9774
9775 <p>For information about our school project you can read
9776 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
9777 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
9778
9779 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9780 Edu?</strong></p>
9781
9782 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
9783 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
9784
9785 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
9786 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
9787 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
9788 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
9789 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
9790 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
9791 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
9792 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
9793 teachers, parents...</p>
9794
9795 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9796 Edu?</strong></p>
9797
9798 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
9799 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
9800
9801 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
9802 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
9803 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
9804 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
9805 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
9806
9807 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
9808 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
9809 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
9810 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
9811 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
9812 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
9813 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
9814
9815 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9816
9817 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
9818 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
9819 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
9820 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
9821
9822 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9823 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9824
9825 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
9826 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
9827 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
9828 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
9829 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
9830
9831 <ul>
9832
9833 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
9834 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
9835 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
9836
9837 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
9838 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
9839 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
9840 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
9841 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
9842 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
9843 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
9844
9845 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
9846 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
9847 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
9848 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
9849
9850 </ul>
9851
9852       </div>
9853       <div class="tags">
9854
9855
9856         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>.
9857
9858
9859       </div>
9860     </div>
9861     <div class="padding"></div>
9862
9863     <div class="entry">
9864       <div class="title">
9865         <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>
9866       </div>
9867       <div class="date">
9868          4th November 2012
9869       </div>
9870       <div class="body">
9871         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
9872 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
9873 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
9874 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
9875 see how a member of the bitcoin community
9876 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
9877 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
9878 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
9879 competition.  My thoughts go to the
9880 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
9881 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
9882 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
9883 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
9884 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
9885
9886 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
9887 that the community already seem to have
9888 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
9889 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
9890 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
9891 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
9892 wealth is available.</p>
9893
9894       </div>
9895       <div class="tags">
9896
9897
9898         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>.
9899
9900
9901       </div>
9902     </div>
9903     <div class="padding"></div>
9904
9905     <div class="entry">
9906       <div class="title">
9907         <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>
9908       </div>
9909       <div class="date">
9910         26th October 2012
9911       </div>
9912       <div class="body">
9913         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
9914 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
9915 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
9916 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
9917 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
9918 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
9919 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
9920 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
9921 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
9922 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
9923 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
9924 it every time.</p>
9925
9926 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
9927 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
9928 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
9929 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
9930 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
9931 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
9932 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
9933 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
9934 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
9935 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
9936 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
9937 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
9938
9939 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
9940 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
9941 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
9942 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
9943 article: First the unplanned outage:
9944
9945 <blockquote><pre>
9946 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
9947 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
9948 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
9949 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
9950 Duration:    40 minutes
9951 Scope:       Exchange 2003
9952 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
9953              a cluster failover.
9954
9955 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
9956              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
9957 Technician:  [xxx]
9958 </pre></blockquote>
9959
9960 Next the planned outage:
9961
9962 <blockquote><pre>
9963 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
9964 Severity:    Major (Planned)
9965 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
9966 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
9967 Duration:    10 hours
9968 Scope:       H2 Transport
9969 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
9970              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
9971              4510s.
9972 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
9973              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
9974              connectivity.
9975 Technician:  [xxx]
9976 </pre></blockquote>
9977
9978 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
9979 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
9980 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
9981 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
9982 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
9983 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
9984 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
9985
9986 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
9987 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
9988 university too.  We do register
9989 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
9990 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
9991 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
9992 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
9993 for other sites to consider too?</p>
9994
9995       </div>
9996       <div class="tags">
9997
9998
9999         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>.
10000
10001
10002       </div>
10003     </div>
10004     <div class="padding"></div>
10005
10006     <div class="entry">
10007       <div class="title">
10008         <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>
10009       </div>
10010       <div class="date">
10011         22nd October 2012
10012       </div>
10013       <div class="body">
10014         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
10015 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
10016 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
10017 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
10018 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
10019 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
10020 background information is available in Norwegian from
10021 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
10022 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
10023 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
10024 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
10025 willing to
10026 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
10027 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
10028 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
10029 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
10030 sounded like
10031 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
10032 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
10033 later.</p>
10034
10035 <p>And thought this action is
10036 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
10037 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
10038 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
10039 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
10040 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
10041 rights.</p>
10042
10043 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
10044 unacceptable terms.  For example
10045 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
10046 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
10047 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
10048 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
10049 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
10050
10051 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
10052 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
10053 restored the account of the user, as reported by
10054 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
10055 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
10056 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
10057 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
10058 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
10059 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
10060 reading two opinions from
10061 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
10062 Phipps</a> and
10063 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
10064 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
10065 details about the original story.</p>
10066
10067       </div>
10068       <div class="tags">
10069
10070
10071         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>.
10072
10073
10074       </div>
10075     </div>
10076     <div class="padding"></div>
10077
10078     <div class="entry">
10079       <div class="title">
10080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
10081       </div>
10082       <div class="date">
10083         18th October 2012
10084       </div>
10085       <div class="body">
10086         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
10087 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
10088 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
10089 across a marvellous drawing by
10090 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
10091 visualising some of what is going on.
10092
10093 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
10094 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
10095
10096 <blockquote>
10097 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
10098 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
10099 </blockquote>
10100
10101 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
10102 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
10103 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
10104 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
10105 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
10106 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
10107
10108       </div>
10109       <div class="tags">
10110
10111
10112         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>.
10113
10114
10115       </div>
10116     </div>
10117     <div class="padding"></div>
10118
10119     <div class="entry">
10120       <div class="title">
10121         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
10122       </div>
10123       <div class="date">
10124         12th October 2012
10125       </div>
10126       <div class="body">
10127         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
10128 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
10129 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
10130 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
10131 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
10132 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
10133 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
10134 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
10135 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
10136 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
10137 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
10138 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
10139 matter".</p>
10140
10141 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
10142 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
10143 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
10144 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
10145 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
10146 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
10147 to argue its side.</p>
10148
10149 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
10150 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
10151 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
10152 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
10153
10154 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
10155 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
10156 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
10157
10158       </div>
10159       <div class="tags">
10160
10161
10162         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>.
10163
10164
10165       </div>
10166     </div>
10167     <div class="padding"></div>
10168
10169     <div class="entry">
10170       <div class="title">
10171         <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>
10172       </div>
10173       <div class="date">
10174          3rd October 2012
10175       </div>
10176       <div class="body">
10177         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
10178 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
10179 the computer science book collection available in his local
10180 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
10181 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
10182 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
10183 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
10184 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
10185 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
10186 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
10187 recently published books.</p>
10188
10189 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
10190 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
10191 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
10192 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
10193 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
10194 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
10195 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
10196 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
10197 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
10198 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
10199 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
10200 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
10201 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
10202 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
10203 for the library that evening.</p>
10204
10205 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
10206 going to know that for example
10207 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
10208 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
10209 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
10210 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
10211 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
10212 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
10213 book right away.</p>
10214
10215       </div>
10216       <div class="tags">
10217
10218
10219         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10220
10221
10222       </div>
10223     </div>
10224     <div class="padding"></div>
10225
10226     <div class="entry">
10227       <div class="title">
10228         <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>
10229       </div>
10230       <div class="date">
10231         23rd September 2012
10232       </div>
10233       <div class="body">
10234         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
10235 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
10236 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10237 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
10238 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
10239 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
10240
10241 When I started, I
10242 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
10243 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
10244 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
10245 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
10246 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
10247 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
10248 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
10249
10250 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
10251
10252 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
10253 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
10254 the project files currently available from
10255 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10256
10257 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
10258 the updated
10259 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
10260 and
10261 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10262 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
10263 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
10264 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
10265
10266       </div>
10267       <div class="tags">
10268
10269
10270         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>.
10271
10272
10273       </div>
10274     </div>
10275     <div class="padding"></div>
10276
10277     <div class="entry">
10278       <div class="title">
10279         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
10280       </div>
10281       <div class="date">
10282         17th September 2012
10283       </div>
10284       <div class="body">
10285         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
10286 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
10287 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
10288 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
10289 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
10290 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
10291 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
10292
10293 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10294
10295 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
10296 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
10297 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
10298 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
10299 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
10300 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
10301 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
10302 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
10303 training is anyway very important</p>
10304
10305 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
10306 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
10307 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
10308 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
10309 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
10310
10311 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10312 project?</strong></p>
10313
10314 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
10315 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
10316 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
10317 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
10318 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
10319 hole.</p>
10320
10321 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10322 Edu?</strong></p>
10323
10324 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
10325 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
10326 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
10327 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
10328 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
10329 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
10330 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
10331 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
10332 hassle.</p>
10333
10334 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10335 Edu?</strong></p>
10336
10337 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
10338 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
10339 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
10340 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
10341 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
10342 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
10343 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
10344 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
10345
10346 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10347
10348 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
10349 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
10350 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
10351 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
10352 has the same...</p>
10353
10354 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
10355 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
10356 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
10357 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
10358
10359 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10360 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10361
10362 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
10363 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
10364 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
10365
10366 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
10367 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
10368 don't.</p>
10369
10370 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
10371 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
10372 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
10373 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
10374 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
10375 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
10376 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
10377
10378       </div>
10379       <div class="tags">
10380
10381
10382         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>.
10383
10384
10385       </div>
10386     </div>
10387     <div class="padding"></div>
10388
10389     <div class="entry">
10390       <div class="title">
10391         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
10392       </div>
10393       <div class="date">
10394         15th September 2012
10395       </div>
10396       <div class="body">
10397         <p>After the
10398 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
10399 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
10400 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
10401 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
10402 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
10403 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
10404 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
10405 was
10406 <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
10407 formal working group should be formed.</p>
10408
10409 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
10410 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
10411 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
10412 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
10413 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
10414 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
10415 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
10416 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
10417
10418 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
10419 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
10420 IETF.</p>
10421
10422       </div>
10423       <div class="tags">
10424
10425
10426         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>.
10427
10428
10429       </div>
10430     </div>
10431     <div class="padding"></div>
10432
10433     <div class="entry">
10434       <div class="title">
10435         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
10436       </div>
10437       <div class="date">
10438         12th September 2012
10439       </div>
10440       <div class="body">
10441         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
10442 publication of of
10443 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
10444 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
10445 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
10446 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
10447 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
10448 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
10449 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
10450 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
10451 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
10452 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
10453
10454 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
10455 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
10456 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
10457 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
10458
10459 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
10460 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
10461
10462       </div>
10463       <div class="tags">
10464
10465
10466         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>.
10467
10468
10469       </div>
10470     </div>
10471     <div class="padding"></div>
10472
10473     <div class="entry">
10474       <div class="title">
10475         <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>
10476       </div>
10477       <div class="date">
10478          7th September 2012
10479       </div>
10480       <div class="body">
10481         <p>As I
10482 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
10483 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
10484 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
10485 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
10486 repository for the project</a>.</p>
10487
10488 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
10489 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
10490 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
10491 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
10492
10493 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
10494 PostScript formats at
10495 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
10496 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
10497
10498       </div>
10499       <div class="tags">
10500
10501
10502         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>.
10503
10504
10505       </div>
10506     </div>
10507     <div class="padding"></div>
10508
10509     <div class="entry">
10510       <div class="title">
10511         <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>
10512       </div>
10513       <div class="date">
10514         23rd August 2012
10515       </div>
10516       <div class="body">
10517         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
10518 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
10519 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
10520 revisit the great site
10521 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
10522 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
10523 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
10524
10525       </div>
10526       <div class="tags">
10527
10528
10529         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>.
10530
10531
10532       </div>
10533     </div>
10534     <div class="padding"></div>
10535
10536     <div class="entry">
10537       <div class="title">
10538         <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>
10539       </div>
10540       <div class="date">
10541         17th August 2012
10542       </div>
10543       <div class="body">
10544         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
10545 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
10546 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
10547 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
10548 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
10549 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
10550 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
10551 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
10552 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
10553 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
10554 summer I
10555 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
10556 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
10557 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
10558
10559 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
10560 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
10561 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
10562 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
10563 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
10564 progress:</p>
10565
10566 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
10567
10568 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
10569 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
10570 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
10571 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
10572 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
10573 english version of the docbook source.</p>
10574
10575 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
10576 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
10577 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
10578 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
10579 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
10580 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
10581 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
10582 project files currently available from <a
10583 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10584
10585 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
10586 the updated
10587 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
10588 and
10589 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10590 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
10591 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
10592 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
10593
10594       </div>
10595       <div class="tags">
10596
10597
10598         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>.
10599
10600
10601       </div>
10602     </div>
10603     <div class="padding"></div>
10604
10605     <div class="entry">
10606       <div class="title">
10607         <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>
10608       </div>
10609       <div class="date">
10610         10th August 2012
10611       </div>
10612       <div class="body">
10613         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
10614 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
10615 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
10616 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
10617 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
10618 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
10619 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
10620 case for the language
10621 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
10622 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
10623
10624 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
10625 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
10626 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
10627 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
10628 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
10629
10630 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
10631 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
10632 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
10633 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
10634 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
10635 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
10636 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
10637 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
10638 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
10639 alias for 'nb'.</p>
10640
10641 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
10642 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
10643 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
10644 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
10645 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
10646 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
10647 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
10648 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
10649 at the same time. :(</p>
10650
10651 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
10652 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
10653 processors. :(</p>
10654
10655 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
10656
10657       </div>
10658       <div class="tags">
10659
10660
10661         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>.
10662
10663
10664       </div>
10665     </div>
10666     <div class="padding"></div>
10667
10668     <div class="entry">
10669       <div class="title">
10670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
10671       </div>
10672       <div class="date">
10673         31st July 2012
10674       </div>
10675       <div class="body">
10676         <p>I tried to send this text to the
10677 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
10678 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
10679 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
10680 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
10681 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
10682 out.</p>
10683
10684 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
10685 learning curve at the moment.</p>
10686
10687 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
10688 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
10689 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
10690 available from
10691 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
10692 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
10693 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
10694 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
10695 Squeeze.</p>
10696
10697 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
10698 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
10699 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
10700 problems.</p>
10701
10702 <ul>
10703
10704 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
10705    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
10706    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
10707    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
10708    index references spanning several pages (See
10709    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
10710    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
10711    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
10712
10713 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
10714    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
10715    #683163</a>).</li>
10716
10717 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
10718    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
10719    footnote and text body, see
10720    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
10721    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
10722    refs listed are not right).</li>
10723
10724 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
10725
10726 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
10727    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
10728
10729 </ul>
10730
10731 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
10732 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
10733 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
10734
10735 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
10736
10737       </div>
10738       <div class="tags">
10739
10740
10741         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>.
10742
10743
10744       </div>
10745     </div>
10746     <div class="padding"></div>
10747
10748     <div class="entry">
10749       <div class="title">
10750         <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>
10751       </div>
10752       <div class="date">
10753         21st July 2012
10754       </div>
10755       <div class="body">
10756         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
10757 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
10758 norwegian version</a> of the book
10759 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10760 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
10761 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
10762 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
10763 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10764
10765 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
10766 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
10767 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
10768 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
10769 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
10770 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
10771 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
10772 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
10773 print. :)</p>
10774
10775 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
10776 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
10777 language.</p>
10778
10779       </div>
10780       <div class="tags">
10781
10782
10783         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>.
10784
10785
10786       </div>
10787     </div>
10788     <div class="padding"></div>
10789
10790     <div class="entry">
10791       <div class="title">
10792         <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>
10793       </div>
10794       <div class="date">
10795         16th July 2012
10796       </div>
10797       <div class="body">
10798         <p>I am currently working on a
10799 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
10800 to translate</a> the book
10801 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
10802 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
10803 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
10804 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
10805 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
10806 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
10807 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10808
10809 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
10810 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
10811 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
10812 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
10813 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
10814 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
10815 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
10816 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
10817 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
10818
10819       </div>
10820       <div class="tags">
10821
10822
10823         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>.
10824
10825
10826       </div>
10827     </div>
10828     <div class="padding"></div>
10829
10830     <div class="entry">
10831       <div class="title">
10832         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
10833       </div>
10834       <div class="date">
10835          9th July 2012
10836       </div>
10837       <div class="body">
10838         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10839 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
10840 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
10841 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
10842 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
10843 to adjust and scale the just released
10844 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
10845 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
10846 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
10847
10848 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10849
10850 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
10851 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
10852 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
10853 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
10854 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
10855 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
10856 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
10857 perspective when working with IT.</p>
10858
10859 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10860 project?</strong></p>
10861
10862 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
10863 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
10864 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
10865 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
10866 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
10867 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
10868
10869 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10870 Edu?</strong></p>
10871
10872 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
10873 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
10874 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
10875 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
10876 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
10877 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
10878 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
10879 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
10880 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
10881 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
10882 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
10883 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
10884 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
10885 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
10886 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
10887 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
10888 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
10889 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
10890 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
10891 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
10892 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
10893 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
10894 quicker to update.
10895
10896 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10897 Edu?</strong></p>
10898
10899 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
10900 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
10901 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
10902 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
10903 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
10904 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
10905
10906 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
10907 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
10908 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
10909 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
10910 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
10911 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
10912 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
10913 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
10914 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
10915 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
10916 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
10917 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
10918 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
10919 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
10920 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
10921
10922 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
10923 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
10924 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
10925 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
10926 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
10927 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
10928 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
10929 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
10930
10931 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
10932 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
10933 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
10934 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
10935 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
10936 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
10937 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
10938 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
10939 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
10940 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
10941 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
10942 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
10943 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
10944 sound file.</p>
10945
10946 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
10947 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
10948 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
10949 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
10950 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
10951 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
10952 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
10953 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
10954 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
10955
10956 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10957
10958 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
10959 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
10960 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
10961 )</p>
10962
10963 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10964 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10965
10966 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
10967 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
10968 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
10969 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
10970 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
10971 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
10972 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
10973 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
10974 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
10975 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
10976 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
10977 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
10978 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
10979 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
10980 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
10981
10982 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
10983 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
10984 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
10985 management with Airtime</a>,
10986 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
10987 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
10988 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
10989 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
10990 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
10991
10992       </div>
10993       <div class="tags">
10994
10995
10996         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>.
10997
10998
10999       </div>
11000     </div>
11001     <div class="padding"></div>
11002
11003     <div class="entry">
11004       <div class="title">
11005         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
11006       </div>
11007       <div class="date">
11008          8th July 2012
11009       </div>
11010       <div class="body">
11011         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
11012 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
11013 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
11014 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
11015 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
11016 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
11017 Steinberg in his blog post
11018 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
11019 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
11020 spending of your tax money.</p>
11021
11022 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
11023 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
11024 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
11025 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
11026 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
11027 purchases.</p>
11028
11029       </div>
11030       <div class="tags">
11031
11032
11033         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>.
11034
11035
11036       </div>
11037     </div>
11038     <div class="padding"></div>
11039
11040     <div class="entry">
11041       <div class="title">
11042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
11043       </div>
11044       <div class="date">
11045          7th July 2012
11046       </div>
11047       <div class="body">
11048         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11049 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
11050 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
11051 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
11052 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
11053 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
11054 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
11055 receive.  The software is
11056
11057 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
11058 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
11059 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
11060 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
11061 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
11062 Windows</a>.</p>
11063
11064 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
11065 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
11066
11067 <p><ul>
11068
11069   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
11070     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
11071
11072   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
11073     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
11074     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
11075     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
11076     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
11077     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
11078     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
11079     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
11080     </li>
11081
11082   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
11083     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
11084
11085   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
11086     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
11087
11088   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
11089     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
11090
11091   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
11092
11093   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
11094     formats </li>
11095
11096   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
11097     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
11098     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
11099     (as separate sets)</li>
11100
11101   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
11102     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
11103     percentage)</li>
11104
11105   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
11106     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
11107     memory):
11108     <ul>
11109       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
11110       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
11111       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
11112       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
11113       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
11114       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
11115       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
11116       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
11117       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
11118       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
11119           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
11120           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
11121           activity)</li>
11122       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
11123       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
11124     </ul></li>
11125
11126   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
11127     <ul>
11128       <li>Break periods</li>
11129       <li>For teacher(s):
11130         <ul>
11131           <li>Not available periods</li>
11132           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
11133           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
11134           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
11135           <li>Min hours daily</li>
11136           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
11137
11138           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
11139             days per week</li>
11140         </ul></li>
11141       <li>For students (sets):
11142         <ul>
11143           <li>Not available periods</li>
11144           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
11145           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
11146           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
11147           <li>Min hours daily</li>
11148           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
11149
11150           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
11151             days per week</li>
11152         </ul></li>
11153       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
11154         <ul>
11155           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
11156           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
11157           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
11158           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
11159           <li>End(s) students day</li>
11160           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
11161           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
11162             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
11163           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
11164           <li>Not overlapping</li>
11165           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
11166           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
11167         </ul></li>
11168     </ul></li>
11169
11170   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
11171     <ul>
11172       <li>Room not available periods</li>
11173       <li>For teacher(s):
11174         <ul>
11175           <li>Home room(s)</li>
11176           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
11177           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
11178         </ul>
11179       </li>
11180
11181       <li>For students (sets):
11182         <ul>
11183           <li>Home room(s)</li>
11184           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
11185           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
11186         </ul>
11187       </li>
11188       <li>Preferred room(s):
11189         <ul>
11190           <li>For a subject</li>
11191           <li>For an activity tag</li>
11192           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
11193           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
11194         </ul>
11195       </li>
11196
11197       <li>For a set of activities:
11198         <ul>
11199           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
11200         </ul>
11201       </li>
11202     </ul>
11203   </li>
11204 </ul></p>
11205
11206 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
11207 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
11208 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
11209 manually, check it out.
11210
11211 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
11212 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
11213 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
11214 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
11215 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
11216 section</a>.</p>
11217
11218       </div>
11219       <div class="tags">
11220
11221
11222         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>.
11223
11224
11225       </div>
11226     </div>
11227     <div class="padding"></div>
11228
11229     <div class="entry">
11230       <div class="title">
11231         <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>
11232       </div>
11233       <div class="date">
11234          3rd July 2012
11235       </div>
11236       <div class="body">
11237         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
11238 project (Norwegian version of
11239 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
11240 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
11241 a problem with the municipalities using
11242 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
11243 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
11244 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
11245 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
11246 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
11247 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
11248 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
11249 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
11250 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
11251 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
11252 the From: header.</p>
11253
11254 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
11255 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
11256 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
11257 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
11258 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
11259 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
11260 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
11261 behaviour.</p>
11262
11263 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
11264 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
11265 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
11266 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
11267 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
11268 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
11269 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
11270
11271       </div>
11272       <div class="tags">
11273
11274
11275         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>.
11276
11277
11278       </div>
11279     </div>
11280     <div class="padding"></div>
11281
11282     <div class="entry">
11283       <div class="title">
11284         <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>
11285       </div>
11286       <div class="date">
11287         26th June 2012
11288       </div>
11289       <div class="body">
11290         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
11291 another interview with the people behind
11292 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
11293 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
11294 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
11295 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
11296 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
11297 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11298 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
11299
11300 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11301
11302 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
11303 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
11304 ICT in schools</p>
11305
11306 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11307 project?</strong></p>
11308
11309 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
11310 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
11311 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
11312 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
11313
11314 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11315 Edu?</strong></p>
11316
11317 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
11318 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
11319 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
11320 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
11321
11322 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11323 Edu?</strong></p>
11324
11325 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
11326 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
11327 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
11328 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
11329 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
11330 technologies in school.</p>
11331
11332 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11333
11334 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
11335 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
11336 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
11337
11338 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11339 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11340
11341 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
11342 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
11343 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
11344 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
11345
11346 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
11347 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
11348 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
11349
11350 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
11351 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
11352 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
11353 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
11354 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
11355 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
11356 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
11357 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
11358 working there.</p>
11359
11360       </div>
11361       <div class="tags">
11362
11363
11364         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>.
11365
11366
11367       </div>
11368     </div>
11369     <div class="padding"></div>
11370
11371     <div class="entry">
11372       <div class="title">
11373         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11374       </div>
11375       <div class="date">
11376         24th June 2012
11377       </div>
11378       <div class="body">
11379         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
11380 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
11381 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
11382 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
11383 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
11384 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
11385 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
11386 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
11387 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
11388 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
11389 missing in my book.</p>
11390
11391 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
11392 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
11393 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
11394 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
11395 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
11396 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
11397 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
11398
11399       </div>
11400       <div class="tags">
11401
11402
11403         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>.
11404
11405
11406       </div>
11407     </div>
11408     <div class="padding"></div>
11409
11410     <div class="entry">
11411       <div class="title">
11412         <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>
11413       </div>
11414       <div class="date">
11415         11th June 2012
11416       </div>
11417       <div class="body">
11418         <p>During my work on
11419 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
11420 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
11421 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
11422 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
11423 explanation.</p>
11424
11425 <p><ul>
11426
11427 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
11428 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
11429 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
11430 system depend on tasksel tasks in
11431 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
11432 installation.</li>
11433
11434 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
11435 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
11436 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
11437 at least try to enable it for these services:
11438 <ul>
11439
11440   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
11441     quotas.</li>
11442   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
11443   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
11444   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
11445   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
11446   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
11447
11448 </ul></li>
11449
11450 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
11451 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
11452 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
11453 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
11454
11455 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
11456 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
11457 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
11458
11459 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
11460 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
11461 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
11462 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
11463 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
11464 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
11465
11466 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
11467 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
11468 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
11469 in Wheezy.
11470
11471 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
11472 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
11473 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
11474
11475 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
11476 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
11477 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
11478 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
11479
11480 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
11481 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
11482 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
11483 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
11484
11485 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
11486 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
11487 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
11488
11489 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
11490 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
11491 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
11492
11493 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
11494 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
11495 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
11496 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
11497 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
11498
11499 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
11500 <ul>
11501
11502 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
11503 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
11504 <li>and probably more?</li>
11505 </ul></li>
11506
11507 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
11508 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
11509 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
11510 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
11511 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
11512 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
11513 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
11514 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
11515
11516
11517 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
11518 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
11519 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
11520 use.</li>
11521
11522 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
11523 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
11524 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
11525 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
11526 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
11527
11528 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
11529 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
11530 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
11531 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
11532 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
11533 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
11534
11535 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
11536 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
11537 There are at least three implementations,
11538 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
11539 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
11540 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
11541 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
11542 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
11543 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
11544 given room.</li>
11545
11546 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
11547 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
11548 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
11549 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
11550 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
11551 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
11552 investigated.</li>
11553
11554 </ul></p>
11555
11556 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
11557 version.</p>
11558
11559       </div>
11560       <div class="tags">
11561
11562
11563         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>.
11564
11565
11566       </div>
11567     </div>
11568     <div class="padding"></div>
11569
11570     <div class="entry">
11571       <div class="title">
11572         <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>
11573       </div>
11574       <div class="date">
11575          9th June 2012
11576       </div>
11577       <div class="body">
11578         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
11579 <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
11580 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
11581 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
11582 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
11583 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
11584 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
11585 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
11586 be willing to pay for.</p>
11587
11588 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
11589 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
11590 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
11591 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
11592 Orwell</a>.</p>
11593
11594       </div>
11595       <div class="tags">
11596
11597
11598         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>.
11599
11600
11601       </div>
11602     </div>
11603     <div class="padding"></div>
11604
11605     <div class="entry">
11606       <div class="title">
11607         <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>
11608       </div>
11609       <div class="date">
11610          6th June 2012
11611       </div>
11612       <div class="body">
11613         <p>A few days ago
11614 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
11615 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
11616 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
11617 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
11618 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
11619 code for HP, Dell and IBM
11620 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
11621 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
11622 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
11623 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
11624 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
11625
11626 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
11627 output:
11628
11629 <blockquote><pre>
11630 % 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>
11631 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": ""})
11632 %
11633 </pre></blockquote>
11634
11635 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
11636 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
11637 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
11638
11639       </div>
11640       <div class="tags">
11641
11642
11643         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>.
11644
11645
11646       </div>
11647     </div>
11648     <div class="padding"></div>
11649
11650     <div class="entry">
11651       <div class="title">
11652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
11653       </div>
11654       <div class="date">
11655          2nd June 2012
11656       </div>
11657       <div class="body">
11658         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
11659 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11660 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
11661 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
11662 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11663 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
11664
11665 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11666
11667 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
11668 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
11669 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
11670 by Angela).</p>
11671
11672 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
11673 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
11674 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
11675 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
11676 becoming an osteopath.</p>
11677
11678 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
11679 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
11680 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
11681 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
11682 skills with communication skills.</p>
11683
11684 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11685 project?</strong></p>
11686
11687 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
11688 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
11689 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
11690 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
11691 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
11692
11693 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
11694 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
11695 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
11696 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
11697 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
11698 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
11699 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
11700 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
11701 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
11702
11703 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
11704 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
11705 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
11706
11707 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
11708
11709 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
11710 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
11711 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
11712 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
11713 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
11714 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
11715 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
11716 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
11717 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
11718 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
11719 point.</p>
11720
11721 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
11722 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
11723 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
11724 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
11725 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
11726 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
11727
11728 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
11729 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
11730 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
11731 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
11732 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
11733 spare time.</p>
11734
11735 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
11736 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
11737 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
11738 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
11739 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
11740
11741 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
11742 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
11743 avoidance do exist.</p>
11744
11745 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
11746 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
11747 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
11748 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
11749 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
11750 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
11751 and probably a gain for all.</p>
11752
11753 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11754 Edu?</strong></p>
11755
11756 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
11757 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
11758 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
11759 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
11760 project communication, honest communication within the group of
11761 developers, etc.</p>
11762
11763 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11764 Edu?</strong></p>
11765
11766 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
11767
11768 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
11769 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
11770 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
11771 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
11772 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
11773 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
11774 contribute).</p>
11775
11776 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
11777 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
11778 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
11779 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
11780 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
11781 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
11782 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
11783 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
11784 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
11785 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
11786
11787 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11788
11789 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
11790
11791 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
11792 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
11793 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
11794
11795 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
11796 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
11797 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
11798 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
11799
11800 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
11801 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
11802 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
11803 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
11804 whiteboard.</p>
11805
11806 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
11807
11808 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11809 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11810
11811 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
11812 enrol people.</p>
11813
11814       </div>
11815       <div class="tags">
11816
11817
11818         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>.
11819
11820
11821       </div>
11822     </div>
11823     <div class="padding"></div>
11824
11825     <div class="entry">
11826       <div class="title">
11827         <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>
11828       </div>
11829       <div class="date">
11830          1st June 2012
11831       </div>
11832       <div class="body">
11833         <p>A few years ago I wrote
11834 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
11835 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
11836 I have learned from colleges here at the
11837 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
11838 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
11839 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
11840 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
11841 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
11842
11843 <p><pre>
11844 use strict;
11845 use warnings;
11846 use SOAP::Lite;
11847 use Data::Dumper;
11848 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
11849 my $App = 'test';
11850 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
11851 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
11852 my $s = SOAP::Lite
11853     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
11854     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
11855     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
11856     ;
11857 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
11858     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
11859     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
11860     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
11861 );
11862 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
11863 </pre></p>
11864
11865 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
11866
11867 <p><pre>
11868 $VAR1 = {
11869           'Asset' => {
11870                      'Entitlements' => {
11871                                        'EntitlementData' => [
11872                                                             {
11873                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
11874                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
11875                                                               'Provider' => '',
11876                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
11877                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
11878                                                             },
11879                                                             {
11880                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
11881                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
11882                                                               'Provider' => '',
11883                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
11884                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
11885                                                             },
11886                                                             {
11887                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
11888                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
11889                                                               'Provider' => '',
11890                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
11891                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
11892                                                             }
11893                                                           ]
11894                                      },
11895                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
11896                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
11897                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
11898                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
11899                                           'Buid' => '2323',
11900                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
11901                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
11902                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
11903                                         }
11904                    }
11905         };
11906 </pre></p>
11907
11908 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
11909 service outside the
11910 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
11911 documentation</a>, and according to
11912 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
11913 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
11914 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
11915
11916 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
11917 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
11918
11919       </div>
11920       <div class="tags">
11921
11922
11923         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>.
11924
11925
11926       </div>
11927     </div>
11928     <div class="padding"></div>
11929
11930     <div class="entry">
11931       <div class="title">
11932         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
11933       </div>
11934       <div class="date">
11935         31st May 2012
11936       </div>
11937       <div class="body">
11938         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
11939 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
11940 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
11941 running Debian Squeeze, where
11942 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
11943 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
11944 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
11945 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
11946 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
11947 another day.</p>
11948
11949 <p>After calibration, I get a
11950 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
11951 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
11952 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
11953 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
11954 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
11955 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
11956 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
11957 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
11958 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
11959 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
11960 and a simple</p>
11961
11962 <p><pre>
11963 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
11964 </pre></p>
11965
11966 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
11967 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
11968 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
11969 enough for now.</p>
11970
11971       </div>
11972       <div class="tags">
11973
11974
11975         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11976
11977
11978       </div>
11979     </div>
11980     <div class="padding"></div>
11981
11982     <div class="entry">
11983       <div class="title">
11984         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
11985       </div>
11986       <div class="date">
11987         27th May 2012
11988       </div>
11989       <div class="body">
11990         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
11991 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11992 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
11993 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
11994 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
11995 since then, helping to make sure the
11996 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11997 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
11998
11999 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12000
12001 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
12002 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
12003 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
12004 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
12005 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
12006 our computer network.</p>
12007
12008 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
12009 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
12010 (4 months).</p>
12011
12012 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12013 project?</strong></p>
12014
12015 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
12016 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
12017 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
12018 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
12019 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
12020 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
12021 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
12022 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
12023 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
12024 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
12025 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
12026 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
12027 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
12028 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
12029
12030 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12031 Edu?</strong></p>
12032
12033 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
12034 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
12035 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
12036 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
12037 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
12038 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
12039 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
12040 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
12041
12042 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12043 Edu?</strong></p>
12044
12045 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
12046 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
12047 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
12048 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
12049 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
12050 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
12051 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
12052 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
12053 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
12054 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
12055 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
12056 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
12057
12058 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12059
12060 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
12061 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
12062 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
12063
12064 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12065 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12066
12067 <p><ol>
12068
12069 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
12070 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
12071 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
12072 developing.</li>
12073
12074 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
12075 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
12076 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
12077 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
12078 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
12079
12080 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
12081 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
12082 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
12083
12084 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
12085 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
12086 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
12087 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
12088
12089 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
12090 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
12091 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
12092
12093 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
12094
12095 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
12096 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
12097 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
12098 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
12099
12100 </ol></p>
12101
12102       </div>
12103       <div class="tags">
12104
12105
12106         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>.
12107
12108
12109       </div>
12110     </div>
12111     <div class="padding"></div>
12112
12113     <div class="entry">
12114       <div class="title">
12115         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
12116       </div>
12117       <div class="date">
12118         26th May 2012
12119       </div>
12120       <div class="body">
12121         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
12122 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
12123 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
12124 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
12125 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
12126
12127 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
12128 <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>
12129 comment:</p>
12130
12131 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
12132 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
12133 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
12134 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
12135 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
12136 </blockquote></p>
12137
12138 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
12139 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
12140 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
12141 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
12142 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
12143 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
12144 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
12145 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
12146 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
12147 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
12148 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
12149 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
12150 of wasted effort.</p>
12151
12152 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
12153 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
12154 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
12155
12156 <p>See
12157 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
12158 and
12159 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
12160 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
12161 </blockquote></p>
12162
12163       </div>
12164       <div class="tags">
12165
12166
12167         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>.
12168
12169
12170       </div>
12171     </div>
12172     <div class="padding"></div>
12173
12174     <div class="entry">
12175       <div class="title">
12176         <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>
12177       </div>
12178       <div class="date">
12179         18th May 2012
12180       </div>
12181       <div class="body">
12182         <p>In january, I
12183 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
12184 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
12185 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
12186 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
12187 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
12188 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
12189 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
12190 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
12191 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
12192 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
12193
12194 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
12195 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
12196 drivers. :)</p>
12197
12198       </div>
12199       <div class="tags">
12200
12201
12202         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12203
12204
12205       </div>
12206     </div>
12207     <div class="padding"></div>
12208
12209     <div class="entry">
12210       <div class="title">
12211         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
12212       </div>
12213       <div class="date">
12214         13th May 2012
12215       </div>
12216       <div class="body">
12217         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
12218 publish another interview with the people behind
12219 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
12220 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
12221 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
12222 details get right before release.
12223
12224 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12225
12226 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
12227 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
12228 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
12229 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
12230 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
12231 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
12232 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
12233 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
12234
12235 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
12236 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
12237 home since 2006.</p>
12238
12239 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12240 project?</strong></p>
12241
12242 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
12243 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
12244 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
12245 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
12246 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
12247 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
12248
12249 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
12250 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
12251 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
12252 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
12253 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
12254 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
12255 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
12256 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
12257 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
12258 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
12259 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
12260 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
12261 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
12262 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
12263 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
12264 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
12265
12266 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12267 Edu?</strong></p>
12268
12269 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
12270 for me as today.</p>
12271
12272 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
12273
12274 <p><ul>
12275
12276 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
12277 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
12278
12279 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
12280 cost.</li>
12281
12282 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
12283 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
12284 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
12285 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
12286 server</li>
12287
12288 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
12289 school.</li>
12290
12291 </ul></p>
12292
12293 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
12294 came up in this way:</p>
12295
12296 <p><ul>
12297
12298 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
12299 now.</li>
12300
12301 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
12302 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
12303 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
12304
12305 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
12306 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
12307 interfaces used in the past.</li>
12308
12309 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
12310 different needs.</li>
12311
12312 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
12313
12314 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
12315 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
12316 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
12317
12318 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
12319 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
12320
12321 </ul></p>
12322
12323 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12324 Edu?</strong></p>
12325
12326 <p><ul>
12327
12328 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
12329 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
12330 whole municipality areas.</li>
12331
12332 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
12333 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
12334 politicians.</li>
12335
12336 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
12337
12338 </ul></p>
12339
12340 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12341
12342 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
12343 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
12344 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
12345 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
12346 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
12347 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
12348
12349 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
12350 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
12351 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
12352 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
12353 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
12354
12355 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12356 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12357
12358 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
12359 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
12360 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
12361
12362       </div>
12363       <div class="tags">
12364
12365
12366         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>.
12367
12368
12369       </div>
12370     </div>
12371     <div class="padding"></div>
12372
12373     <div class="entry">
12374       <div class="title">
12375         <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>
12376       </div>
12377       <div class="date">
12378         30th April 2012
12379       </div>
12380       <div class="body">
12381         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
12382 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
12383
12384 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
12385 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
12386 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
12387 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
12388 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
12389 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
12390 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
12391 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
12392 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
12393 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
12394 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
12395 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
12396 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
12397 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
12398 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
12399 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
12400
12401 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
12402 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
12403 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
12404 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
12405 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
12406 finally found a Danish supplier
12407 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
12408 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
12409 days ago.</p>
12410
12411 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
12412 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
12413 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
12414 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
12415 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
12416 toys.</p>
12417
12418       </div>
12419       <div class="tags">
12420
12421
12422         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12423
12424
12425       </div>
12426     </div>
12427     <div class="padding"></div>
12428
12429     <div class="entry">
12430       <div class="title">
12431         <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>
12432       </div>
12433       <div class="date">
12434         26th April 2012
12435       </div>
12436       <div class="body">
12437         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
12438 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
12439 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
12440 that the video editor application included with
12441 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
12442 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
12443 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
12444
12445 <p><blockquote>
12446 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
12447 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
12448 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
12449 </blockquote></p>
12450
12451 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
12452
12453 <p><blockquote>
12454 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
12455 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
12456 </blockquote></p>
12457
12458 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
12459 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
12460 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
12461 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
12462 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
12463 video.  AMR is
12464 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
12465 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
12466 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
12467 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
12468 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
12469 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
12470 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
12471
12472 <p>I know why I prefer
12473 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
12474 standards</a> also for video.</p>
12475
12476       </div>
12477       <div class="tags">
12478
12479
12480         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
12481
12482
12483       </div>
12484     </div>
12485     <div class="padding"></div>
12486
12487     <div class="entry">
12488       <div class="title">
12489         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
12490       </div>
12491       <div class="date">
12492         19th April 2012
12493       </div>
12494       <div class="body">
12495         <p>Here in Norway, the
12496 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
12497 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
12498 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
12499 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
12500 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
12501 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
12502 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
12503 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
12504 on the same level.</p>
12505
12506 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
12507 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
12508 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
12509 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
12510 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
12511 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
12512 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
12513 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
12514 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
12515 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
12516 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
12517 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
12518 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
12519 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
12520 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
12521 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
12522 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
12523 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
12524
12525 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
12526 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
12527 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
12528 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
12529 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
12530 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
12531 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
12532 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
12533
12534 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
12535 from Simon Phipps
12536 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
12537 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
12538
12539 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
12540 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
12541 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
12542 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
12543 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
12544 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
12545 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
12546 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
12547 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
12548
12549       </div>
12550       <div class="tags">
12551
12552
12553         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>.
12554
12555
12556       </div>
12557     </div>
12558     <div class="padding"></div>
12559
12560     <div class="entry">
12561       <div class="title">
12562         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
12563       </div>
12564       <div class="date">
12565         15th April 2012
12566       </div>
12567       <div class="body">
12568         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
12569 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
12570 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
12571 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
12572 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
12573 up in the recently released
12574 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
12575 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
12576
12577 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12578
12579 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
12580 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
12581 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
12582 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
12583 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
12584 information technology and science/technology.</p>
12585
12586 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12587 project?</strong></p>
12588
12589 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
12590 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
12591 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
12592 contributing.</p>
12593
12594 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12595 Edu?</strong></p>
12596
12597 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
12598 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
12599 Debian Project!</p>
12600
12601 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12602 Edu?</strong></p>
12603
12604 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
12605 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
12606 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
12607 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
12608 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
12609 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
12610 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
12611
12612 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
12613 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
12614
12615 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12616
12617 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
12618 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
12619 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
12620 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
12621
12622 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12623 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12624
12625 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
12626 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
12627 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
12628 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
12629 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
12630 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
12631 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
12632
12633 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
12634 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
12635 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
12636 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
12637 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
12638 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
12639 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
12640 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
12641
12642       </div>
12643       <div class="tags">
12644
12645
12646         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>.
12647
12648
12649       </div>
12650     </div>
12651     <div class="padding"></div>
12652
12653     <div class="entry">
12654       <div class="title">
12655         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
12656       </div>
12657       <div class="date">
12658          8th April 2012
12659       </div>
12660       <div class="body">
12661         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
12662 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
12663 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
12664 contributor to the
12665 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
12666 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
12667
12668 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12669
12670 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
12671 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
12672
12673 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12674 project?</strong></p>
12675
12676 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
12677 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
12678 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
12679 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
12680 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
12681 "localisation".</p>
12682
12683 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12684 Edu?</strong></p>
12685
12686 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12687 Edu?</strong></p>
12688
12689 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
12690 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
12691 education system.</p>
12692
12693 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
12694 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
12695 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
12696 money on the latest hardware.</p>
12697
12698 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12699
12700 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
12701 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
12702 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
12703
12704 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12705 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12706
12707 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
12708 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
12709 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
12710
12711       </div>
12712       <div class="tags">
12713
12714
12715         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>.
12716
12717
12718       </div>
12719     </div>
12720     <div class="padding"></div>
12721
12722     <div class="entry">
12723       <div class="title">
12724         <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>
12725       </div>
12726       <div class="date">
12727          6th April 2012
12728       </div>
12729       <div class="body">
12730         <p>Recently I have spent time with
12731 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
12732 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
12733 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
12734 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
12735 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
12736 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
12737 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
12738 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
12739
12740 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
12741 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
12742 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
12743 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
12744 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
12745 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
12746 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
12747 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
12748
12749 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
12750 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
12751 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
12752 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
12753 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
12754 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
12755 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
12756 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
12757
12758 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
12759 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
12760 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
12761 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
12762 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
12763 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
12764 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
12765 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
12766 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
12767 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
12768
12769 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
12770 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
12771 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
12772 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
12773
12774 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
12775 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
12776
12777       </div>
12778       <div class="tags">
12779
12780
12781         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>.
12782
12783
12784       </div>
12785     </div>
12786     <div class="padding"></div>
12787
12788     <div class="entry">
12789       <div class="title">
12790         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
12791       </div>
12792       <div class="date">
12793          5th April 2012
12794       </div>
12795       <div class="body">
12796         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
12797 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
12798 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
12799 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
12800 for schools.  Check out his article
12801 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
12802 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
12803
12804       </div>
12805       <div class="tags">
12806
12807
12808         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>.
12809
12810
12811       </div>
12812     </div>
12813     <div class="padding"></div>
12814
12815     <div class="entry">
12816       <div class="title">
12817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
12818       </div>
12819       <div class="date">
12820          1st April 2012
12821       </div>
12822       <div class="body">
12823         <p>Germany is a core area for the
12824 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12825 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
12826 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
12827
12828 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12829
12830 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
12831 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
12832 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
12833 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
12834 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
12835 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
12836 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
12837 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
12838
12839 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
12840 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
12841 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
12842 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
12843 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
12844 the end of April this year.</p>
12845
12846 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12847 project?</strong></p>
12848
12849 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
12850 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
12851 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
12852 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
12853 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
12854 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
12855 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
12856 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
12857 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
12858 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
12859 Skolelinux.</p>
12860
12861 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
12862 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
12863 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
12864 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
12865 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
12866 the admin teachers.</p>
12867
12868 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12869 Edu?</strong></p>
12870
12871 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
12872 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
12873 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
12874
12875 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
12876 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
12877 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
12878 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
12879 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
12880
12881 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12882 Edu?</strong></p>
12883
12884 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
12885
12886 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12887
12888 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
12889 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
12890 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
12891 LibreOffice.</p>
12892
12893 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12894 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12895
12896 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
12897 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
12898 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
12899
12900       </div>
12901       <div class="tags">
12902
12903
12904         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>.
12905
12906
12907       </div>
12908     </div>
12909     <div class="padding"></div>
12910
12911     <div class="entry">
12912       <div class="title">
12913         <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>
12914       </div>
12915       <div class="date">
12916         25th March 2012
12917       </div>
12918       <div class="body">
12919         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
12920
12921 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
12922 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
12923 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
12924 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
12925 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
12926 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
12927 and download as a
12928 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
12929 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
12930
12931 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
12932   <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"' />
12933     <p>Download video as
12934       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
12935 </video></p>
12936
12937       </div>
12938       <div class="tags">
12939
12940
12941         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>.
12942
12943
12944       </div>
12945     </div>
12946     <div class="padding"></div>
12947
12948     <div class="entry">
12949       <div class="title">
12950         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
12951       </div>
12952       <div class="date">
12953         19th March 2012
12954       </div>
12955       <div class="body">
12956         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
12957 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
12958 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
12959 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
12960 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
12961
12962 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12963
12964 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
12965 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
12966 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
12967 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
12968 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
12969 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
12970 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
12971 installations.</p>
12972
12973 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12974 project?</strong></p>
12975
12976 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
12977 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
12978 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
12979 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
12980 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
12981 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
12982 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
12983 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
12984 these things we decided to try it.</p>
12985
12986 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12987 Edu?</strong></p>
12988
12989 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
12990 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
12991 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
12992 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
12993 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
12994 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
12995 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
12996 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
12997
12998 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12999 Edu?</strong></p>
13000
13001 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
13002 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
13003 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
13004 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
13005 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
13006
13007 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13008
13009 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
13010 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
13011 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
13012 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
13013 that counts...)</p>
13014
13015 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13016 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13017
13018 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
13019 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
13020 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
13021 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
13022 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
13023 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
13024 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
13025 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
13026 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
13027 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
13028 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
13029
13030 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
13031 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
13032 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
13033
13034       </div>
13035       <div class="tags">
13036
13037
13038         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>.
13039
13040
13041       </div>
13042     </div>
13043     <div class="padding"></div>
13044
13045     <div class="entry">
13046       <div class="title">
13047         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
13048       </div>
13049       <div class="date">
13050         16th March 2012
13051       </div>
13052       <div class="body">
13053         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
13054 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
13055 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
13056 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
13057
13058 <ol>
13059
13060 <li>The documentation is written in a
13061 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
13062 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
13063 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
13064 docbook XML.</li>
13065
13066 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
13067 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
13068 with the translated text.</li>
13069
13070 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
13071 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
13072 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
13073 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
13074 images.</li>
13075
13076 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
13077 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
13078
13079 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
13080 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
13081
13082 </ol>
13083
13084 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
13085 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
13086 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
13087 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
13088 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
13089
13090 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
13091 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
13092 package</a>.</p>
13093
13094       </div>
13095       <div class="tags">
13096
13097
13098         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>.
13099
13100
13101       </div>
13102     </div>
13103     <div class="padding"></div>
13104
13105     <div class="entry">
13106       <div class="title">
13107         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
13108       </div>
13109       <div class="date">
13110         11th March 2012
13111       </div>
13112       <div class="body">
13113         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
13114 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
13115 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13116 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
13117 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
13118 you have not done so already.</p>
13119
13120 <p>I plan to present the new version at
13121 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
13122 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
13123 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
13124
13125       </div>
13126       <div class="tags">
13127
13128
13129         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>.
13130
13131
13132       </div>
13133     </div>
13134     <div class="padding"></div>
13135
13136     <div class="entry">
13137       <div class="title">
13138         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
13139       </div>
13140       <div class="date">
13141          9th March 2012
13142       </div>
13143       <div class="body">
13144         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
13145 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
13146 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13147 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
13148 more international audience.</p>
13149
13150 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13151 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
13152 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
13153 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
13154 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
13155 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
13156 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
13157
13158
13159 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13160
13161 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
13162 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
13163 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
13164 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
13165 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
13166 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
13167 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
13168 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
13169 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
13170 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
13171 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
13172
13173 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13174 project?</strong></p>
13175
13176 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
13177 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
13178 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
13179 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
13180 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
13181 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
13182 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
13183 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
13184 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
13185 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
13186 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
13187 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
13188 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
13189
13190 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13191 Edu?</strong></p>
13192
13193 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
13194 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
13195 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
13196 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
13197 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
13198 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
13199 Japan.</p>
13200
13201 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13202 Edu?</strong></p>
13203
13204 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
13205 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
13206 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
13207 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
13208 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
13209 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
13210 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
13211 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
13212 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
13213 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
13214 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
13215 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
13216 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
13217 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
13218 help.</p>
13219
13220 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13221
13222 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
13223 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
13224 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
13225 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
13226 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
13227 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
13228 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
13229 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
13230 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
13231 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
13232 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
13233
13234 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13235 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13236
13237 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
13238 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
13239 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
13240 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
13241 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
13242 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
13243 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
13244 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
13245 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
13246 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
13247 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
13248 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
13249
13250       </div>
13251       <div class="tags">
13252
13253
13254         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>.
13255
13256
13257       </div>
13258     </div>
13259     <div class="padding"></div>
13260
13261     <div class="entry">
13262       <div class="title">
13263         <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>
13264       </div>
13265       <div class="date">
13266          7th March 2012
13267       </div>
13268       <div class="body">
13269         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
13270
13271 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
13272 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
13273 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
13274 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
13275 download as a
13276 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
13277 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
13278
13279 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
13280   <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"' />
13281     <p>Download video as
13282       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
13283 </video></p>
13284
13285       </div>
13286       <div class="tags">
13287
13288
13289         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>.
13290
13291
13292       </div>
13293     </div>
13294     <div class="padding"></div>
13295
13296     <div class="entry">
13297       <div class="title">
13298         <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>
13299       </div>
13300       <div class="date">
13301          4th March 2012
13302       </div>
13303       <div class="body">
13304         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
13305 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13306 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13307 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
13308 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
13309 need a software solution for your school.</p>
13310
13311       </div>
13312       <div class="tags">
13313
13314
13315         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>.
13316
13317
13318       </div>
13319     </div>
13320     <div class="padding"></div>
13321
13322     <div class="entry">
13323       <div class="title">
13324         <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>
13325       </div>
13326       <div class="date">
13327          3rd March 2012
13328       </div>
13329       <div class="body">
13330         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
13331 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
13332 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
13333 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
13334 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
13335 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
13336 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
13337 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
13338 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
13339 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
13340 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
13341 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
13342 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
13343 year...</p>
13344
13345 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
13346 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
13347 name,
13348 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
13349 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
13350 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
13351 mean). I've been following
13352 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
13353 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
13354 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
13355 Check it out. :)</p>
13356
13357       </div>
13358       <div class="tags">
13359
13360
13361         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>.
13362
13363
13364       </div>
13365     </div>
13366     <div class="padding"></div>
13367
13368     <div class="entry">
13369       <div class="title">
13370         <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>
13371       </div>
13372       <div class="date">
13373         27th February 2012
13374       </div>
13375       <div class="body">
13376         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
13377 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13378 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
13379 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
13380 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
13381 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
13382 need a software solution for your school.</p>
13383
13384       </div>
13385       <div class="tags">
13386
13387
13388         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>.
13389
13390
13391       </div>
13392     </div>
13393     <div class="padding"></div>
13394
13395     <div class="entry">
13396       <div class="title">
13397         <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>
13398       </div>
13399       <div class="date">
13400         19th February 2012
13401       </div>
13402       <div class="body">
13403         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
13404 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
13405 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
13406 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13407 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
13408 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
13409 solution for your school.</p>
13410
13411       </div>
13412       <div class="tags">
13413
13414
13415         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>.
13416
13417
13418       </div>
13419     </div>
13420     <div class="padding"></div>
13421
13422     <div class="entry">
13423       <div class="title">
13424         <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>
13425       </div>
13426       <div class="date">
13427         14th February 2012
13428       </div>
13429       <div class="body">
13430         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
13431 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
13432 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
13433 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
13434 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
13435 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
13436 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
13437 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
13438 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
13439
13440 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
13441 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
13442 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
13443 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
13444 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
13445
13446 <blockquote><pre>
13447 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
13448 do
13449     printf "Failed disk $d: "
13450     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
13451 done
13452 </blockquote></pre>
13453
13454 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
13455 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
13456
13457 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
13458
13459 <blockquote><pre>
13460 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
13461 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
13462 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
13463 </blockquote></pre>
13464
13465 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
13466 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
13467 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
13468 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
13469 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
13470 mounted inside my box.</p>
13471
13472 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
13473 Software RAID in the
13474 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
13475 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
13476 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
13477 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
13478 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
13479 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
13480
13481       </div>
13482       <div class="tags">
13483
13484
13485         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>.
13486
13487
13488       </div>
13489     </div>
13490     <div class="padding"></div>
13491
13492     <div class="entry">
13493       <div class="title">
13494         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13495       </div>
13496       <div class="date">
13497         13th February 2012
13498       </div>
13499       <div class="body">
13500         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
13501 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
13502 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
13503 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
13504 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
13505 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
13506 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
13507 change the global proxy setting by editing
13508 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
13509 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
13510
13511 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
13512 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
13513 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
13514
13515 <blockquote><pre>
13516 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
13517 {
13518    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
13519        isPlainHostName(host) ||
13520        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
13521       return "DIRECT";
13522    else
13523       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
13524 }
13525 </pre></blockquote>
13526
13527 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
13528
13529 <blockquote><pre>
13530 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
13531 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
13532 </pre></blockquote>
13533
13534 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
13535 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
13536 would be used for
13537 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
13538 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
13539 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
13540 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
13541 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
13542 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
13543 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
13544 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
13545 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
13546 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
13547
13548 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
13549 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
13550 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
13551 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
13552 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
13553 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
13554
13555 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
13556 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
13557 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
13558 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
13559 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
13560 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
13561 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
13562 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
13563 the network setup changes.</p>
13564
13565 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
13566 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
13567 draft</a> and a
13568 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
13569 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
13570
13571       </div>
13572       <div class="tags">
13573
13574
13575         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>.
13576
13577
13578       </div>
13579     </div>
13580     <div class="padding"></div>
13581
13582     <div class="entry">
13583       <div class="title">
13584         <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>
13585       </div>
13586       <div class="date">
13587          5th February 2012
13588       </div>
13589       <div class="body">
13590         <p>Since the Lenny version of
13591 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
13592 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
13593 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
13594 in the morning.  This is done using the
13595 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
13596
13597 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
13598 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
13599 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
13600 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
13601 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
13602 the
13603 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
13604 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
13605 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
13606 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
13607 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
13608
13609 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
13610 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
13611 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
13612 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
13613 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
13614 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
13615 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
13616
13617 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
13618 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
13619 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
13620 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
13621 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
13622
13623       </div>
13624       <div class="tags">
13625
13626
13627         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>.
13628
13629
13630       </div>
13631     </div>
13632     <div class="padding"></div>
13633
13634     <div class="entry">
13635       <div class="title">
13636         <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>
13637       </div>
13638       <div class="date">
13639          4th February 2012
13640       </div>
13641       <div class="body">
13642         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
13643 publish the third beta version of
13644 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
13645 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
13646 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
13647 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
13648 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
13649 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
13650 on the project announcement list.</p>
13651
13652 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
13653 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
13654
13655 <ul>
13656
13657 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
13658   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
13659   the installation.</li>
13660
13661 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
13662   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
13663
13664 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
13665   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
13666   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
13667
13668 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
13669   for the local system administrator is created during installation
13670   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
13671   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
13672   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
13673   up to date on the system.</li>
13674
13675 </ul>
13676
13677 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
13678 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
13679 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
13680 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
13681
13682 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
13683 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
13684 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
13685 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
13686 will see you there?</p>
13687
13688       </div>
13689       <div class="tags">
13690
13691
13692         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>.
13693
13694
13695       </div>
13696     </div>
13697     <div class="padding"></div>
13698
13699     <div class="entry">
13700       <div class="title">
13701         <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>
13702       </div>
13703       <div class="date">
13704         27th January 2012
13705       </div>
13706       <div class="body">
13707         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
13708 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
13709 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
13710 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
13711 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
13712 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
13713 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
13714
13715 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
13716 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
13717 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
13718 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
13719 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
13720 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
13721 not taken care of by this.</p>
13722
13723 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
13724 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
13725 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
13726 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
13727 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
13728 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
13729 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
13730 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
13731 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
13732 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
13733 firmware packages.</p>
13734
13735 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
13736 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
13737 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
13738 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
13739 initrd with extra firmware, the
13740 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
13741 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
13742 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
13743
13744 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
13745 network cards working.  For this,
13746 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
13747 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
13748 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
13749
13750 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
13751 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
13752 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
13753
13754 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
13755 try.</p>
13756
13757       </div>
13758       <div class="tags">
13759
13760
13761         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>.
13762
13763
13764       </div>
13765     </div>
13766     <div class="padding"></div>
13767
13768     <div class="entry">
13769       <div class="title">
13770         <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>
13771       </div>
13772       <div class="date">
13773         25th January 2012
13774       </div>
13775       <div class="body">
13776         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
13777 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
13778 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
13779 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
13780 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
13781
13782 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
13783 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
13784 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
13785 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
13786 this is done, log on to the central server and run
13787 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
13788 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
13789 will look similar to this:</p>
13790
13791 <p><blockquote><pre>
13792 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
13793 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
13794 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.
13795
13796 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
13797
13798 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13799 enter password: *******
13800 %
13801 </pre></blockquote></p>
13802
13803 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
13804 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
13805 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
13806 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
13807 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
13808 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
13809 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
13810 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
13811 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
13812 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
13813 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
13814 automatically.</p>
13815
13816 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
13817 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
13818
13819 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
13820 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
13821 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
13822
13823       </div>
13824       <div class="tags">
13825
13826
13827         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>.
13828
13829
13830       </div>
13831     </div>
13832     <div class="padding"></div>
13833
13834     <div class="entry">
13835       <div class="title">
13836         <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>
13837       </div>
13838       <div class="date">
13839         10th January 2012
13840       </div>
13841       <div class="body">
13842         <p>In the Squeeze version of
13843 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
13844 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
13845 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
13846 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
13847 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
13848 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
13849 first time.</p>
13850
13851 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
13852 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
13853 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
13854 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
13855
13856 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
13857 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
13858 new setting.</p>
13859
13860 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
13861 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
13862 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
13863
13864       </div>
13865       <div class="tags">
13866
13867
13868         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>.
13869
13870
13871       </div>
13872     </div>
13873     <div class="padding"></div>
13874
13875     <div class="entry">
13876       <div class="title">
13877         <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>
13878       </div>
13879       <div class="date">
13880          7th January 2012
13881       </div>
13882       <div class="body">
13883         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
13884 the second beta version of
13885 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
13886 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
13887 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
13888 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
13889 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
13890 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
13891 on the project announcement list.</p>
13892
13893       </div>
13894       <div class="tags">
13895
13896
13897         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>.
13898
13899
13900       </div>
13901     </div>
13902     <div class="padding"></div>
13903
13904     <div class="entry">
13905       <div class="title">
13906         <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>
13907       </div>
13908       <div class="date">
13909          3rd January 2012
13910       </div>
13911       <div class="body">
13912         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
13913 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
13914 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
13915 interesting.</p>
13916
13917 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
13918 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
13919 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
13920 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
13921 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
13922 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
13923 wrap up its tasks.</p>
13924
13925 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
13926 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
13927 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
13928 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
13929 because I was typing.</P>
13930
13931 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
13932 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
13933 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
13934 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
13935 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
13936 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
13937 generate entropy.</p>
13938
13939 <p>The fix is in
13940 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
13941 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
13942 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
13943 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
13944
13945       </div>
13946       <div class="tags">
13947
13948
13949         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>.
13950
13951
13952       </div>
13953     </div>
13954     <div class="padding"></div>
13955
13956     <div class="entry">
13957       <div class="title">
13958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
13959       </div>
13960       <div class="date">
13961         21st November 2011
13962       </div>
13963       <div class="body">
13964         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
13965 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
13966 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
13967 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
13968 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
13969 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
13970 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
13971 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
13972 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
13973 the tools to do so.</p>
13974
13975 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
13976 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
13977 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
13978 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
13979
13980 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
13981 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
13982 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
13983 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
13984 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
13985 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
13986 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
13987 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
13988
13989 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
13990 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
13991 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
13992
13993 <p><pre>
13994 #!/usr/bin/perl
13995 use strict;
13996 use warnings;
13997 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
13998 BEGIN {
13999     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
14000     my %rhelmodules = (
14001         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
14002         );
14003     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
14004         eval "use $module;";
14005         if ($@) {
14006             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
14007             system("yum install -y $pkg");
14008             eval "use $module;";
14009         }
14010     }
14011 }
14012 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
14013
14014 upgrade_dell();
14015
14016 exit 0;
14017
14018 sub run_firmware_script {
14019     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
14020     unless ($script) {
14021         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
14022         exit 1
14023     }
14024     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
14025
14026     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
14027         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
14028     } else {
14029         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
14030     }
14031 }
14032
14033 sub run_firmware_scripts {
14034     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
14035     # Run firmware packages
14036     for my $dir (@dirs) {
14037         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
14038         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
14039         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
14040             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
14041             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
14042         }
14043         closedir $dh;
14044     }
14045 }
14046
14047 sub download {
14048     my $url = shift;
14049     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
14050     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
14051 }
14052
14053 sub upgrade_dell {
14054     my @dirs;
14055     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
14056     chomp $product;
14057
14058     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
14059
14060         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
14061         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
14062
14063         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
14064             CLEANUP => 1
14065             );
14066         chdir($tmpdir);
14067         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
14068         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
14069         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
14070         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
14071         my $fwopts = "-q";
14072         if (@paths) {
14073             for my $url (@paths) {
14074                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
14075             }
14076             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
14077         } else {
14078             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
14079             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
14080         }
14081         chdir('/');
14082     } else {
14083         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
14084         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
14085     }
14086 }
14087
14088 sub fetch_dell_fw {
14089     my $path = shift;
14090     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
14091     download($url);
14092 }
14093
14094 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
14095 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
14096 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
14097 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
14098     my $filename = shift;
14099
14100     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
14101     chomp $product;
14102     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
14103
14104     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
14105
14106     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
14107     my @paths;
14108     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
14109         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
14110         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
14111         my $oscode;
14112         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
14113             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
14114         } else {
14115             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
14116         }
14117         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
14118         {
14119             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
14120         }
14121     }
14122     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
14123         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
14124
14125         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
14126         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
14127
14128         my $cpath = $component->{path};
14129         for my $path (@paths) {
14130             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
14131                 push(@paths, $cpath);
14132             }
14133         }
14134     }
14135     return @paths;
14136 }
14137 </pre>
14138
14139 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
14140 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
14141 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
14142 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
14143 outdated.</p>
14144
14145       </div>
14146       <div class="tags">
14147
14148
14149         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>.
14150
14151
14152       </div>
14153     </div>
14154     <div class="padding"></div>
14155
14156     <div class="entry">
14157       <div class="title">
14158         <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>
14159       </div>
14160       <div class="date">
14161          7th October 2011
14162       </div>
14163       <div class="body">
14164         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
14165 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
14166 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
14167 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
14168 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
14169 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
14170 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
14171 models.</p>
14172
14173 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
14174 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
14175 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
14176 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
14177
14178 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
14179 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
14180 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
14181 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
14182 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
14183 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
14184 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
14185 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
14186 distributed.</p>
14187
14188 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
14189
14190 <ul>
14191
14192 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
14193   other relevant equipment.</li>
14194
14195 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
14196
14197 </ul>
14198
14199 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
14200 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
14201 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
14202 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
14203 books available.</p>
14204
14205 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
14206 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
14207 libraries. :)</p>
14208
14209       </div>
14210       <div class="tags">
14211
14212
14213         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>.
14214
14215
14216       </div>
14217     </div>
14218     <div class="padding"></div>
14219
14220     <div class="entry">
14221       <div class="title">
14222         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
14223       </div>
14224       <div class="date">
14225         17th September 2011
14226       </div>
14227       <div class="body">
14228         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
14229 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
14230 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
14231 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
14232 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
14233 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
14234 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
14235 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
14236
14237 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
14238
14239 <blockquote><pre>
14240 #!/bin/sh
14241 # apt-get install lsdvd
14242 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14243 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
14244 </pre></blockquote>
14245
14246 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
14247 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
14248 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
14249 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
14250
14251 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
14252 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
14253 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
14254 back as an ISO.
14255
14256 <blockquote><pre>
14257 #!/bin/sh
14258 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
14259 set -e
14260 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
14261 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14262 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
14263 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
14264 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
14265 </pre></blockquote>
14266
14267 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
14268
14269 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
14270 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
14271 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
14272 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
14273 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
14274
14275 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
14276 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
14277 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
14278 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
14279 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
14280 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
14281
14282       </div>
14283       <div class="tags">
14284
14285
14286         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>.
14287
14288
14289       </div>
14290     </div>
14291     <div class="padding"></div>
14292
14293     <div class="entry">
14294       <div class="title">
14295         <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>
14296       </div>
14297       <div class="date">
14298          4th August 2011
14299       </div>
14300       <div class="body">
14301         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
14302 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
14303 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
14304 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
14305 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
14306 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
14307 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
14308 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
14309 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
14310
14311 <p><blockquote>
14312 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
14313 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
14314 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
14315 </blockquote></p>
14316
14317 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
14318 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
14319 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
14320 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
14321 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
14322 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
14323 hard to explain.</p>
14324
14325 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
14326 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
14327 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
14328 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
14329 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
14330 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
14331 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
14332 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
14333 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
14334 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
14335 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
14336 mode).</p>
14337
14338 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
14339 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
14340 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
14341 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
14342 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
14343 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
14344 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
14345 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
14346 after visiting single user mode.</p>
14347
14348 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
14349 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
14350 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
14351 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
14352 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
14353 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
14354 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
14355 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
14356
14357 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
14358 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
14359 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
14360
14361       </div>
14362       <div class="tags">
14363
14364
14365         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>.
14366
14367
14368       </div>
14369     </div>
14370     <div class="padding"></div>
14371
14372     <div class="entry">
14373       <div class="title">
14374         <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>
14375       </div>
14376       <div class="date">
14377         30th July 2011
14378       </div>
14379       <div class="body">
14380         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
14381 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
14382 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
14383 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
14384 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
14385 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
14386 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
14387 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
14388 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
14389 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
14390 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
14391 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
14392 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
14393
14394 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
14395 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
14396 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
14397 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
14398 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
14399 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
14400 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
14401 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
14402 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
14403
14404 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
14405 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
14406 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
14407 is presented.</p>
14408
14409 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
14410 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
14411 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
14412 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
14413 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
14414 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
14415 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
14416 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
14417 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
14418 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
14419 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
14420 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
14421 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
14422 find time to push this forward.</p>
14423
14424       </div>
14425       <div class="tags">
14426
14427
14428         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>.
14429
14430
14431       </div>
14432     </div>
14433     <div class="padding"></div>
14434
14435     <div class="entry">
14436       <div class="title">
14437         <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>
14438       </div>
14439       <div class="date">
14440         29th July 2011
14441       </div>
14442       <div class="body">
14443         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
14444 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
14445 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
14446 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
14447 issues.</p>
14448
14449 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
14450 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
14451 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
14452
14453 <ol>
14454
14455 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
14456 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
14457 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
14458 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
14459 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
14460 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
14461 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
14462 Debian.</li>
14463
14464 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
14465 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
14466 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
14467 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
14468 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
14469 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
14470 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
14471 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
14472 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
14473 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
14474 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
14475 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
14476 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
14477
14478 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
14479 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
14480 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
14481 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
14482 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
14483 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
14484 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
14485 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
14486 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
14487 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
14488
14489 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
14490 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
14491 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
14492 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
14493 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
14494 latter behaviour.</li>
14495
14496 </ol>
14497
14498 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
14499 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
14500 it do not matter much.</p>
14501
14502 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
14503 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
14504 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
14505
14506       </div>
14507       <div class="tags">
14508
14509
14510         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14511
14512
14513       </div>
14514     </div>
14515     <div class="padding"></div>
14516
14517     <div class="entry">
14518       <div class="title">
14519         <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>
14520       </div>
14521       <div class="date">
14522         26th July 2011
14523       </div>
14524       <div class="body">
14525         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
14526 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
14527 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
14528 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
14529 security support for a few years.</p>
14530
14531 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
14532 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
14533 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
14534 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
14535 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
14536 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
14537 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
14538 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
14539 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
14540 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
14541 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
14542 easier in the future.</p>
14543
14544 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
14545 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
14546 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
14547 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
14548 do not have time for.</p>
14549
14550       </div>
14551       <div class="tags">
14552
14553
14554         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>.
14555
14556
14557       </div>
14558     </div>
14559     <div class="padding"></div>
14560
14561     <div class="entry">
14562       <div class="title">
14563         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
14564       </div>
14565       <div class="date">
14566         20th June 2011
14567       </div>
14568       <div class="body">
14569         <p>Reading
14570 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
14571 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
14572 parts of the
14573 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
14574 and
14575 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
14576 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
14577 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
14578 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
14579
14580       </div>
14581       <div class="tags">
14582
14583
14584         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>.
14585
14586
14587       </div>
14588     </div>
14589     <div class="padding"></div>
14590
14591     <div class="entry">
14592       <div class="title">
14593         <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>
14594       </div>
14595       <div class="date">
14596         30th April 2011
14597       </div>
14598       <div class="body">
14599         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
14600 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
14601 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
14602 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
14603 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
14604 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
14605 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
14606 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
14607 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
14608 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
14609
14610 <p>Where is it?  Visit
14611 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
14612 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
14613 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
14614 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
14615
14616       </div>
14617       <div class="tags">
14618
14619
14620         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>.
14621
14622
14623       </div>
14624     </div>
14625     <div class="padding"></div>
14626
14627     <div class="entry">
14628       <div class="title">
14629         <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>
14630       </div>
14631       <div class="date">
14632         29th April 2011
14633       </div>
14634       <div class="body">
14635         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
14636 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
14637 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
14638 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
14639 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
14640 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
14641 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
14642 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
14643 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
14644 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
14645 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
14646 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
14647 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
14648
14649 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
14650 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
14651 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
14652 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
14653 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
14654 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
14655 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
14656 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
14657 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
14658 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
14659 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
14660 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
14661 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
14662
14663 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
14664 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
14665 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
14666 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
14667 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
14668 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
14669 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
14670 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
14671 it.</p>
14672
14673 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
14674 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
14675 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
14676 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
14677 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
14678 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
14679 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
14680
14681 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
14682 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
14683 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
14684 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
14685 and range= options.</p>
14686
14687 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
14688 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
14689 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
14690 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
14691 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
14692 to best handle this.  I've noticed
14693 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
14694 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
14695 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
14696 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
14697
14698 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
14699 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
14700 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
14701 discussions instead of only
14702 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
14703 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
14704 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
14705 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
14706 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
14707 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
14708
14709       </div>
14710       <div class="tags">
14711
14712
14713         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>.
14714
14715
14716       </div>
14717     </div>
14718     <div class="padding"></div>
14719
14720     <div class="entry">
14721       <div class="title">
14722         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
14723       </div>
14724       <div class="date">
14725          6th April 2011
14726       </div>
14727       <div class="body">
14728         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
14729 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
14730 A few days ago the project
14731 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
14732 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
14733 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
14734 into Gnash.</p>
14735
14736       </div>
14737       <div class="tags">
14738
14739
14740         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>.
14741
14742
14743       </div>
14744     </div>
14745     <div class="padding"></div>
14746
14747     <div class="entry">
14748       <div class="title">
14749         <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>
14750       </div>
14751       <div class="date">
14752          3rd April 2011
14753       </div>
14754       <div class="body">
14755         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
14756 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
14757 update in English.</p>
14758
14759 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
14760 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
14761 of the British service
14762 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
14763 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
14764 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
14765 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
14766 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
14767 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
14768 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
14769 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
14770 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
14771 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
14772 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
14773 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
14774 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
14775
14776 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
14777 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
14778 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
14779 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
14780 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
14781 public infrastructure.</p>
14782
14783 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
14784 such service?</p>
14785
14786       </div>
14787       <div class="tags">
14788
14789
14790         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>.
14791
14792
14793       </div>
14794     </div>
14795     <div class="padding"></div>
14796
14797     <div class="entry">
14798       <div class="title">
14799         <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>
14800       </div>
14801       <div class="date">
14802         28th January 2011
14803       </div>
14804       <div class="body">
14805         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
14806 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
14807 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
14808 available on the Internet, and check our locally
14809 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
14810 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
14811 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
14812 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
14813 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
14814 out which security holes were present in our free software
14815 collection.</p>
14816
14817 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
14818 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
14819 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
14820 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
14821 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
14822 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
14823 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
14824 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
14825 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
14826 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
14827 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
14828 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
14829 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
14830 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
14831 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
14832 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
14833
14834 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
14835 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
14836 check out, one could look up
14837 <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
14838 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
14839 The most recent one is
14840 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
14841 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
14842 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
14843
14844 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
14845 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
14846 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
14847 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
14848 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
14849 security issues out.</p>
14850
14851 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
14852 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
14853 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
14854 RHEL is providing
14855 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
14856 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
14857 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
14858
14859 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
14860 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
14861 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
14862 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
14863 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
14864 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
14865 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
14866 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
14867 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
14868 established soon.</p>
14869
14870 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
14871 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
14872 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
14873 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
14874 for their packages.</p>
14875
14876       </div>
14877       <div class="tags">
14878
14879
14880         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>.
14881
14882
14883       </div>
14884     </div>
14885     <div class="padding"></div>
14886
14887     <div class="entry">
14888       <div class="title">
14889         <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>
14890       </div>
14891       <div class="date">
14892         23rd January 2011
14893       </div>
14894       <div class="body">
14895         <p>In the
14896 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
14897 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
14898 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
14899 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
14900 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
14901 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
14902 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
14903 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
14904 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
14905 one of my machines like this:</p>
14906
14907 <pre>
14908 loaded modules:
14909 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
14910 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
14911 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
14912 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
14913 10de:03ec pata_amd
14914 10de:03f6 sata_nv
14915 1022:1103 k8temp
14916 109e:036e bttv
14917 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
14918 11ab:4364 sky2
14919 </pre>
14920
14921 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
14922 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
14923
14924 <pre>
14925 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
14926     echo loaded pci modules:
14927     (
14928         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
14929         for address in * ; do
14930             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
14931                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
14932                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
14933                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
14934                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
14935                     echo "$id $module"
14936                 fi
14937             fi
14938         done
14939     )
14940     echo
14941 fi
14942 </pre>
14943
14944 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
14945 mappings:</p>
14946
14947 <pre>
14948 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
14949     echo loaded usb modules:
14950     (
14951         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
14952         for address in * ; do
14953             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
14954                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
14955                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
14956                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
14957                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
14958                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
14959                         echo "$id $module"
14960                     fi
14961                 fi
14962             fi
14963         done
14964     )
14965     echo
14966 fi
14967 </pre>
14968
14969 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
14970 well.</p>
14971
14972       </div>
14973       <div class="tags">
14974
14975
14976         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>.
14977
14978
14979       </div>
14980     </div>
14981     <div class="padding"></div>
14982
14983     <div class="entry">
14984       <div class="title">
14985         <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>
14986       </div>
14987       <div class="date">
14988         16th January 2011
14989       </div>
14990       <div class="body">
14991         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
14992 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
14993 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
14994 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
14995 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
14996 the Wikipedia article on
14997 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
14998 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
14999 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
15000 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
15001 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
15002 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
15003 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
15004 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
15005 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
15006 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
15007 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
15008 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
15009
15010 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
15011 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
15012 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
15013 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
15014 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
15015 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
15016 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
15017 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
15018 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
15019 from last week</a>.</p>
15020
15021 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
15022 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
15023 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
15024 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
15025 was without royalties and license terms, check out
15026 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
15027 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
15028
15029 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
15030 available from
15031 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
15032 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
15033 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
15034
15035 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
15036 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
15037 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
15038 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
15039
15040       </div>
15041       <div class="tags">
15042
15043
15044         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15045
15046
15047       </div>
15048     </div>
15049     <div class="padding"></div>
15050
15051     <div class="entry">
15052       <div class="title">
15053         <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>
15054       </div>
15055       <div class="date">
15056         12th January 2011
15057       </div>
15058       <div class="body">
15059         <p>Today I discovered
15060 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
15061 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
15062 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
15063 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
15064 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
15065 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
15066 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
15067 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
15068 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
15069 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
15070 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
15071 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
15072 on the Google announcement is available from
15073 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
15074 A good read. :)</p>
15075
15076 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
15077 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
15078 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
15079 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
15080 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
15081 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
15082 browsers support H.264, and others support
15083 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
15084 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
15085 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
15086 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
15087 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
15088 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
15089 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
15090 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
15091
15092 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
15093 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
15094 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
15095 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
15096 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
15097 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
15098 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
15099
15100 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
15101 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
15102 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
15103 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
15104 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
15105 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
15106 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
15107
15108 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
15109 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
15110 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
15111 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
15112 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
15113 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
15114 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
15115
15116 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
15117 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
15118 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
15119 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
15120 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
15121 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
15122 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
15123 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
15124 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
15125 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
15126 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
15127 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
15128 I guess time will tell.</p>
15129
15130 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
15131 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
15132 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
15133
15134       </div>
15135       <div class="tags">
15136
15137
15138         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15139
15140
15141       </div>
15142     </div>
15143     <div class="padding"></div>
15144
15145     <div class="entry">
15146       <div class="title">
15147         <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>
15148       </div>
15149       <div class="date">
15150         30th December 2010
15151       </div>
15152       <div class="body">
15153         <p>After trying to
15154 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
15155 Ogg Theora</a> to
15156 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
15157 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
15158 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
15159 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
15160 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
15161 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
15162 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
15163
15164 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
15165 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
15166 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
15167 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
15168 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
15169 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
15170 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
15171
15172 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
15173 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
15174
15175       </div>
15176       <div class="tags">
15177
15178
15179         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>.
15180
15181
15182       </div>
15183     </div>
15184     <div class="padding"></div>
15185
15186     <div class="entry">
15187       <div class="title">
15188         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
15189       </div>
15190       <div class="date">
15191         27th December 2010
15192       </div>
15193       <div class="body">
15194         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
15195 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
15196 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
15197 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
15198 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
15199 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
15200 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
15201 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
15202
15203 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
15204 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
15205 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
15206 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
15207 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
15208 page</a>.</p>
15209
15210 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
15211 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
15212 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
15213 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
15214 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
15215 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
15216 specification on equal terms.</p>
15217
15218 <blockquote>
15219
15220 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
15221 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
15222 open standard:</p>
15223
15224 <ul>
15225
15226 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
15227 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
15228 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
15229 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
15230
15231 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
15232 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
15233 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
15234 nominal fee.</li>
15235
15236 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
15237 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
15238 free basis.</li>
15239
15240 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
15241
15242 </ul>
15243 </blockquote>
15244
15245 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
15246 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
15247 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
15248 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
15249 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
15250 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
15251 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
15252
15253 <blockquote>
15254
15255 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
15256
15257 <ol>
15258
15259 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
15260 tilgængelig.</li>
15261
15262 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
15263 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
15264
15265 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
15266 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
15267
15268 </ol>
15269
15270 </blockquote>
15271
15272 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
15273 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
15274
15275 <blockquote>
15276
15277 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
15278
15279 <ol>
15280
15281 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
15282 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
15283
15284 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
15285 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
15286 Standard themselves;</li>
15287
15288 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
15289 any party or in any business model;</li>
15290
15291 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
15292 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
15293 parties;</li>
15294
15295 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
15296 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
15297 parties.</li>
15298
15299 </ol>
15300
15301 </blockquote>
15302
15303 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
15304 its
15305 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
15306 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
15307
15308 <blockquote>
15309 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
15310
15311 <ul>
15312
15313 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
15314   democratic:
15315
15316          <ul>
15317
15318          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
15319             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
15320             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
15321             and managed.</li>
15322
15323          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
15324             method, can be changed through input from all
15325             participants.</li>
15326
15327          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
15328             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
15329
15330          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
15331             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
15332
15333          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
15334             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
15335             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
15336
15337          </ul>
15338
15339 </li>
15340
15341 </ul>
15342
15343 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
15344 <ul>
15345
15346 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
15347   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
15348   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
15349   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
15350   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
15351
15352 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
15353   a technical or economic barriers</li>
15354
15355 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
15356   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
15357   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
15358   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
15359   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
15360   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
15361   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
15362   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
15363   intended to function.</li>
15364
15365 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
15366   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
15367   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
15368
15369 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
15370   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
15371   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
15372   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
15373   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
15374   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
15375   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
15376   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
15377
15378       <ul>
15379
15380       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
15381         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
15382         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
15383
15384       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
15385         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
15386         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
15387         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
15388
15389       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
15390         licensor</li>
15391
15392       </ul>
15393 </li>
15394
15395 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
15396   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
15397   or restricted licensing terms</li>
15398
15399 </ul>
15400
15401 </blockquote>
15402
15403 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
15404 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
15405 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
15406 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
15407 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
15408 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
15409 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
15410 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
15411 Standards.</p>
15412
15413       </div>
15414       <div class="tags">
15415
15416
15417         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>.
15418
15419
15420       </div>
15421     </div>
15422     <div class="padding"></div>
15423
15424     <div class="entry">
15425       <div class="title">
15426         <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>
15427       </div>
15428       <div class="date">
15429         25th December 2010
15430       </div>
15431       <div class="body">
15432         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
15433 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
15434
15435 <blockquote>
15436
15437 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
15438 as follows:</p>
15439
15440 <ol>
15441
15442 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
15443 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
15444 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
15445
15446 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
15447 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
15448 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
15449 parties.</li>
15450
15451 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
15452 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
15453 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
15454
15455 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
15456 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
15457
15458 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
15459
15460 </ol>
15461
15462 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
15463 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
15464 products based on the standard.</p>
15465 </blockquote>
15466
15467 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
15468 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
15469 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
15470 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
15471 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
15472 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
15473 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
15474 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
15475
15476 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
15477
15478 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
15479 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
15480 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
15481 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
15482 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
15483 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
15484 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
15485 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
15486 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
15487 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
15488 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
15489 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
15490 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
15491 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
15492
15493 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
15494
15495 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
15496 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
15497 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
15498 documentation indicating this.</p>
15499
15500 <p>According to
15501 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
15502 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
15503 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
15504 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
15505 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
15506 report is correct.</p>
15507
15508 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
15509
15510 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
15511 container format</a> and both the
15512 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
15513 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
15514 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
15515
15516 <blockquote>
15517
15518 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
15519 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
15520 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
15521 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
15522 specification compliance.
15523
15524 </blockquote>
15525
15526 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
15527 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
15528 this is the term:<p>
15529
15530 <blockquote>
15531
15532 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
15533 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
15534 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
15535 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
15536 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
15537 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
15538 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
15539 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
15540 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
15541 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
15542 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
15543 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
15544
15545 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
15546 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
15547 </blockquote>
15548
15549 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
15550 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
15551 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
15552 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
15553 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
15554
15555 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
15556
15557 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
15558 Theora format.
15559 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
15560 and
15561 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
15562 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
15563 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
15564 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
15565 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
15566 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
15567 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
15568 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
15569
15570 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
15571
15572 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
15573
15574 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
15575
15576 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
15577 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
15578 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
15579 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
15580 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
15581 this.</p>
15582
15583 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
15584 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
15585
15586       </div>
15587       <div class="tags">
15588
15589
15590         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15591
15592
15593       </div>
15594     </div>
15595     <div class="padding"></div>
15596
15597     <div class="entry">
15598       <div class="title">
15599         <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>
15600       </div>
15601       <div class="date">
15602         25th December 2010
15603       </div>
15604       <div class="body">
15605         <p>A few days ago
15606 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
15607 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
15608 2.0 of
15609 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
15610 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
15611 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
15612 Nothing very surprising there, given
15613 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
15614 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
15615 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
15616 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
15617 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
15618 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
15619 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
15620 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
15621 standard definition from its content.</p>
15622
15623 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
15624 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
15625 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
15626 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
15627 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
15628 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
15629 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
15630 background information about that story is available in
15631 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
15632 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
15633
15634 <blockquote>
15635 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
15636 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
15637 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
15638
15639 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
15640
15641 <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>
15642
15643 <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>
15644
15645 <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>
15646
15647 <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>
15648
15649 <p>
15650 <ul>
15651 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
15652 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
15653 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
15654 </ul>
15655 </p>
15656
15657 <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>
15658
15659 <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>
15660
15661 <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>
15662
15663 <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>
15664
15665 <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>
15666
15667
15668 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
15669 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
15670 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
15671 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
15672 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
15673 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
15674
15675 </p>
15676
15677 <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>
15678
15679 <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>
15680
15681 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
15682
15683 <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>
15684
15685 <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>
15686
15687 <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>
15688
15689 <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>
15690
15691 <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>
15692
15693 <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>
15694
15695 <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>
15696
15697 <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>
15698
15699 <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>
15700
15701 <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>
15702
15703 <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>
15704
15705 <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>
15706
15707 <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>
15708
15709 <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>
15710
15711 <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>
15712
15713 <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>
15714
15715 <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>
15716
15717 <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>
15718
15719 <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>
15720
15721 <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>
15722
15723 <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>
15724
15725 <p>On security:</p>
15726
15727 <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>
15728
15729 <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>
15730
15731 <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>
15732
15733 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
15734
15735 <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>
15736
15737 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
15738
15739 <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>
15740
15741 <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>
15742
15743 <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>
15744
15745 <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>
15746
15747 <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>
15748
15749 <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>
15750
15751 <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>
15752
15753 <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>
15754
15755 <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>
15756
15757 <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>
15758
15759 <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>
15760
15761 <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>
15762
15763 <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>
15764
15765 <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>
15766
15767 <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>
15768
15769 <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>
15770
15771 <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>
15772
15773 <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>
15774
15775 <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>
15776
15777 <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>
15778
15779 <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>
15780
15781 <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>
15782
15783 <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>
15784
15785 <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>
15786
15787 <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>
15788
15789 <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>
15790
15791 <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>
15792
15793 <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>
15794
15795 <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>
15796
15797 <p>Cordially,<br>
15798 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
15799 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
15800 </blockquote>
15801
15802       </div>
15803       <div class="tags">
15804
15805
15806         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>.
15807
15808
15809       </div>
15810     </div>
15811     <div class="padding"></div>
15812
15813     <div class="entry">
15814       <div class="title">
15815         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
15816       </div>
15817       <div class="date">
15818         25th December 2010
15819       </div>
15820       <div class="body">
15821         <p>Half a year ago I
15822 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
15823 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
15824 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
15825 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
15826
15827 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
15828 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
15829 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
15830 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
15831 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
15832 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
15833 got such a great test tool available.</p>
15834
15835       </div>
15836       <div class="tags">
15837
15838
15839         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>.
15840
15841
15842       </div>
15843     </div>
15844     <div class="padding"></div>
15845
15846     <div class="entry">
15847       <div class="title">
15848         <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>
15849       </div>
15850       <div class="date">
15851         22nd December 2010
15852       </div>
15853       <div class="body">
15854         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
15855 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
15856 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
15857 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
15858 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
15859 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
15860 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
15861 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
15862 university.</p>
15863
15864 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
15865 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
15866 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
15867 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
15868 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
15869 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
15870 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
15871 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
15872
15873 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
15874 I perform on a new model.</p>
15875
15876 <ul>
15877
15878 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
15879 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
15880 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
15881
15882 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
15883 installation, X.org is working.</li>
15884
15885 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
15886 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
15887 reported by the program.</li>
15888
15889 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
15890 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
15891 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
15892 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
15893 normally test this by playing
15894 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
15895 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
15896
15897 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
15898 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
15899
15900 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
15901 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
15902
15903 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
15904 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
15905
15906 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
15907 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
15908 few.</li>
15909
15910 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
15911 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
15912 notice this.</li>
15913
15914 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
15915 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
15916 resume.</li>
15917
15918 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
15919 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
15920 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
15921 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
15922 not.</li>
15923
15924 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
15925 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
15926 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
15927 existence.</li>
15928
15929 </ul>
15930
15931 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
15932 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
15933 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
15934 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
15935 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
15936 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
15937 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
15938 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
15939
15940       </div>
15941       <div class="tags">
15942
15943
15944         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>.
15945
15946
15947       </div>
15948     </div>
15949     <div class="padding"></div>
15950
15951     <div class="entry">
15952       <div class="title">
15953         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
15954       </div>
15955       <div class="date">
15956         11th December 2010
15957       </div>
15958       <div class="body">
15959         <p>As I continue to explore
15960 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
15961 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
15962 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
15963
15964 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
15965 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
15966 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
15967 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
15968 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
15969 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
15970 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
15971 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
15972 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
15973 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
15974 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
15975 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
15976 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
15977 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
15978 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
15979 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
15980 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
15981 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
15982 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
15983 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
15984
15985 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
15986 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
15987 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
15988 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
15989 If the Skolelinux foundation
15990 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
15991 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
15992 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
15993 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
15994 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
15995 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
15996 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
15997 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
15998
15999 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
16000 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
16001 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
16002 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
16003 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
16004 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
16005 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
16006 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
16007 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
16008 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
16009 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
16010 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
16011 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
16012 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
16013 currencies.</p>
16014
16015 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
16016 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
16017 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
16018 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
16019 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
16020 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
16021 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
16022 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
16023 BitCoins.  Check out
16024 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
16025 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
16026 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
16027 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
16028 yet.</p>
16029
16030 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
16031 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
16032 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
16033 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
16034 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
16035
16036       </div>
16037       <div class="tags">
16038
16039
16040         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>.
16041
16042
16043       </div>
16044     </div>
16045     <div class="padding"></div>
16046
16047     <div class="entry">
16048       <div class="title">
16049         <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>
16050       </div>
16051       <div class="date">
16052         10th December 2010
16053       </div>
16054       <div class="body">
16055         <p>With this weeks lawless
16056 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
16057 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
16058 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
16059 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
16060 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
16061 A blog post from
16062 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
16063 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
16064 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
16065 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
16066 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
16067 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
16068 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
16069
16070 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
16071 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
16072 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
16073 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
16074 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
16075 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
16076 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
16077 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
16078 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
16079 Debian</a> soon.</p>
16080
16081 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
16082 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
16083 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
16084 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
16085 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
16086 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
16087 you can even get
16088 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
16089 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
16090 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
16091 on the current exchange rates.</p>
16092
16093 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
16094 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
16095 donations to the address
16096 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
16097
16098       </div>
16099       <div class="tags">
16100
16101
16102         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>.
16103
16104
16105       </div>
16106     </div>
16107     <div class="padding"></div>
16108
16109     <div class="entry">
16110       <div class="title">
16111         <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>
16112       </div>
16113       <div class="date">
16114          9th December 2010
16115       </div>
16116       <div class="body">
16117         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
16118 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
16119 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
16120 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
16121 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
16122 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
16123 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
16124 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
16125 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
16126 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
16127 operational.</p>
16128
16129 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
16130 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
16131 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
16132 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
16133 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
16134 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
16135 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
16136
16137       </div>
16138       <div class="tags">
16139
16140
16141         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>.
16142
16143
16144       </div>
16145     </div>
16146     <div class="padding"></div>
16147
16148     <div class="entry">
16149       <div class="title">
16150         <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>
16151       </div>
16152       <div class="date">
16153         29th November 2010
16154       </div>
16155       <div class="body">
16156         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16157 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
16158 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
16159 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
16160 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
16161 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
16162
16163 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
16164 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
16165 will hold its
16166 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
16167 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
16168 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
16169 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
16170 vote this year.</p>
16171
16172       </div>
16173       <div class="tags">
16174
16175
16176         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>.
16177
16178
16179       </div>
16180     </div>
16181     <div class="padding"></div>
16182
16183     <div class="entry">
16184       <div class="title">
16185         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
16186       </div>
16187       <div class="date">
16188         27th November 2010
16189       </div>
16190       <div class="body">
16191         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
16192 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
16193 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
16194 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
16195 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
16196 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
16197 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
16198 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
16199
16200 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
16201 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
16202 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
16203 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
16204 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
16205 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
16206 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
16207 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
16208 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
16209 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
16210 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
16211
16212 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
16213 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
16214 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
16215 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
16216 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
16217 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
16218 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
16219 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
16220 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
16221 what is going on.</p>
16222
16223       </div>
16224       <div class="tags">
16225
16226
16227         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>.
16228
16229
16230       </div>
16231     </div>
16232     <div class="padding"></div>
16233
16234     <div class="entry">
16235       <div class="title">
16236         <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>
16237       </div>
16238       <div class="date">
16239         22nd November 2010
16240       </div>
16241       <div class="body">
16242         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
16243 upgrade testing of the
16244 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
16245 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
16246 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
16247 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
16248
16249 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
16250
16251 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16252
16253 <blockquote><p>
16254   apache2.2-bin
16255   aptdaemon
16256   baobab
16257   binfmt-support
16258   browser-plugin-gnash
16259   cheese-common
16260   cli-common
16261   cups-pk-helper
16262   dmz-cursor-theme
16263   empathy
16264   empathy-common
16265   freedesktop-sound-theme
16266   freeglut3
16267   gconf-defaults-service
16268   gdm-themes
16269   gedit-plugins
16270   geoclue
16271   geoclue-hostip
16272   geoclue-localnet
16273   geoclue-manual
16274   geoclue-yahoo
16275   gnash
16276   gnash-common
16277   gnome
16278   gnome-backgrounds
16279   gnome-cards-data
16280   gnome-codec-install
16281   gnome-core
16282   gnome-desktop-environment
16283   gnome-disk-utility
16284   gnome-screenshot
16285   gnome-search-tool
16286   gnome-session-canberra
16287   gnome-system-log
16288   gnome-themes-extras
16289   gnome-themes-more
16290   gnome-user-share
16291   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
16292   gstreamer0.10-tools
16293   gtk2-engines
16294   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
16295   gtk2-engines-smooth
16296   hamster-applet
16297   libapache2-mod-dnssd
16298   libapr1
16299   libaprutil1
16300   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
16301   libaprutil1-ldap
16302   libart2.0-cil
16303   libboost-date-time1.42.0
16304   libboost-python1.42.0
16305   libboost-thread1.42.0
16306   libchamplain-0.4-0
16307   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
16308   libcheese-gtk18
16309   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
16310   libcryptui0
16311   libdiscid0
16312   libelf1
16313   libepc-1.0-2
16314   libepc-common
16315   libepc-ui-1.0-2
16316   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
16317   libfreerdp0
16318   libgconf2.0-cil
16319   libgdata-common
16320   libgdata7
16321   libgdu-gtk0
16322   libgee2
16323   libgeoclue0
16324   libgexiv2-0
16325   libgif4
16326   libglade2.0-cil
16327   libglib2.0-cil
16328   libgmime2.4-cil
16329   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
16330   libgnome2.24-cil
16331   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
16332   libgpod-common
16333   libgpod4
16334   libgtk2.0-cil
16335   libgtkglext1
16336   libgtksourceview2.0-common
16337   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
16338   libmono-addins0.2-cil
16339   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
16340   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
16341   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
16342   libmono-posix2.0-cil
16343   libmono-security2.0-cil
16344   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
16345   libmono-system2.0-cil
16346   libmtp8
16347   libmusicbrainz3-6
16348   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
16349   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
16350   libopal3.6.8
16351   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
16352   libpt2.6.7
16353   libpython2.6
16354   librpm1
16355   librpmio1
16356   libsdl1.2debian
16357   libsrtp0
16358   libssh-4
16359   libtelepathy-farsight0
16360   libtelepathy-glib0
16361   libtidy-0.99-0
16362   media-player-info
16363   mesa-utils
16364   mono-2.0-gac
16365   mono-gac
16366   mono-runtime
16367   nautilus-sendto
16368   nautilus-sendto-empathy
16369   p7zip-full
16370   pkg-config
16371   python-aptdaemon
16372   python-aptdaemon-gtk
16373   python-axiom
16374   python-beautifulsoup
16375   python-bugbuddy
16376   python-clientform
16377   python-coherence
16378   python-configobj
16379   python-crypto
16380   python-cupshelpers
16381   python-elementtree
16382   python-epsilon
16383   python-evolution
16384   python-feedparser
16385   python-gdata
16386   python-gdbm
16387   python-gst0.10
16388   python-gtkglext1
16389   python-gtksourceview2
16390   python-httplib2
16391   python-louie
16392   python-mako
16393   python-markupsafe
16394   python-mechanize
16395   python-nevow
16396   python-notify
16397   python-opengl
16398   python-openssl
16399   python-pam
16400   python-pkg-resources
16401   python-pyasn1
16402   python-pysqlite2
16403   python-rdflib
16404   python-serial
16405   python-tagpy
16406   python-twisted-bin
16407   python-twisted-conch
16408   python-twisted-core
16409   python-twisted-web
16410   python-utidylib
16411   python-webkit
16412   python-xdg
16413   python-zope.interface
16414   remmina
16415   remmina-plugin-data
16416   remmina-plugin-rdp
16417   remmina-plugin-vnc
16418   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
16419   rhythmbox-plugins
16420   rpm-common
16421   rpm2cpio
16422   seahorse-plugins
16423   shotwell
16424   software-center
16425   system-config-printer-udev
16426   telepathy-gabble
16427   telepathy-mission-control-5
16428   telepathy-salut
16429   tomboy
16430   totem
16431   totem-coherence
16432   totem-mozilla
16433   totem-plugins
16434   transmission-common
16435   xdg-user-dirs
16436   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
16437   xserver-xephyr
16438 </p></blockquote>
16439
16440 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16441
16442 <blockquote><p>
16443   cheese
16444   ekiga
16445   eog
16446   epiphany-extensions
16447   evolution-exchange
16448   fast-user-switch-applet
16449   file-roller
16450   gcalctool
16451   gconf-editor
16452   gdm
16453   gedit
16454   gedit-common
16455   gnome-games
16456   gnome-games-data
16457   gnome-nettool
16458   gnome-system-tools
16459   gnome-themes
16460   gnuchess
16461   gucharmap
16462   guile-1.8-libs
16463   libavahi-ui0
16464   libdmx1
16465   libgalago3
16466   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
16467   libgtksourceview2.0-0
16468   liblircclient0
16469   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
16470   libspeexdsp1
16471   libsvga1
16472   rhythmbox
16473   seahorse
16474   sound-juicer
16475   system-config-printer
16476   totem-common
16477   transmission-gtk
16478   vinagre
16479   vino
16480 </p></blockquote>
16481
16482 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16483
16484 <blockquote><p>
16485   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
16486 </p></blockquote>
16487
16488 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16489
16490 <blockquote><p>
16491 [nothing]
16492 </p></blockquote>
16493
16494 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
16495
16496 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16497
16498 <blockquote><p>
16499   ksmserver
16500 </p></blockquote>
16501
16502 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16503
16504 <blockquote><p>
16505   kwin
16506   network-manager-kde
16507 </p></blockquote>
16508
16509 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16510
16511 <blockquote><p>
16512   arts
16513   dolphin
16514   freespacenotifier
16515   google-gadgets-gst
16516   google-gadgets-xul
16517   kappfinder
16518   kcalc
16519   kcharselect
16520   kde-core
16521   kde-plasma-desktop
16522   kde-standard
16523   kde-window-manager
16524   kdeartwork
16525   kdeartwork-emoticons
16526   kdeartwork-style
16527   kdeartwork-theme-icon
16528   kdebase
16529   kdebase-apps
16530   kdebase-workspace
16531   kdebase-workspace-bin
16532   kdebase-workspace-data
16533   kdeeject
16534   kdelibs
16535   kdeplasma-addons
16536   kdeutils
16537   kdewallpapers
16538   kdf
16539   kfloppy
16540   kgpg
16541   khelpcenter4
16542   kinfocenter
16543   konq-plugins-l10n
16544   konqueror-nsplugins
16545   kscreensaver
16546   kscreensaver-xsavers
16547   ktimer
16548   kwrite
16549   libgle3
16550   libkde4-ruby1.8
16551   libkonq5
16552   libkonq5-templates
16553   libnetpbm10
16554   libplasma-ruby
16555   libplasma-ruby1.8
16556   libqt4-ruby1.8
16557   marble-data
16558   marble-plugins
16559   netpbm
16560   nuvola-icon-theme
16561   plasma-dataengines-workspace
16562   plasma-desktop
16563   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
16564   plasma-runners-addons
16565   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
16566   plasma-scriptengine-python
16567   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
16568   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
16569   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
16570   plasma-scriptengines
16571   plasma-wallpapers-addons
16572   plasma-widget-folderview
16573   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
16574   ruby
16575   sweeper
16576   update-notifier-kde
16577   xscreensaver-data-extra
16578   xscreensaver-gl
16579   xscreensaver-gl-extra
16580   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
16581 </p></blockquote>
16582
16583 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16584
16585 <blockquote><p>
16586   ark
16587   google-gadgets-common
16588   google-gadgets-qt
16589   htdig
16590   kate
16591   kdebase-bin
16592   kdebase-data
16593   kdepasswd
16594   kfind
16595   klipper
16596   konq-plugins
16597   konqueror
16598   ksysguard
16599   ksysguardd
16600   libarchive1
16601   libcln6
16602   libeet1
16603   libeina-svn-06
16604   libggadget-1.0-0b
16605   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
16606   libgps19
16607   libkdecorations4
16608   libkephal4
16609   libkonq4
16610   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
16611   libkscreensaver5
16612   libksgrd4
16613   libksignalplotter4
16614   libkunitconversion4
16615   libkwineffects1a
16616   libmarblewidget4
16617   libntrack-qt4-1
16618   libntrack0
16619   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
16620   libplasmaclock4a
16621   libplasmagenericshell4
16622   libprocesscore4a
16623   libprocessui4a
16624   libqalculate5
16625   libqedje0a
16626   libqtruby4shared2
16627   libqzion0a
16628   libruby1.8
16629   libscim8c2a
16630   libsmokekdecore4-3
16631   libsmokekdeui4-3
16632   libsmokekfile3
16633   libsmokekhtml3
16634   libsmokekio3
16635   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
16636   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
16637   libsmokekparts3
16638   libsmokektexteditor3
16639   libsmokekutils3
16640   libsmokenepomuk3
16641   libsmokephonon3
16642   libsmokeplasma3
16643   libsmokeqtcore4-3
16644   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
16645   libsmokeqtgui4-3
16646   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
16647   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
16648   libsmokeqtscript4-3
16649   libsmokeqtsql4-3
16650   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
16651   libsmokeqttest4-3
16652   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
16653   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
16654   libsmokeqtxml4-3
16655   libsmokesolid3
16656   libsmokesoprano3
16657   libtaskmanager4a
16658   libtidy-0.99-0
16659   libweather-ion4a
16660   libxklavier16
16661   libxxf86misc1
16662   okteta
16663   oxygencursors
16664   plasma-dataengines-addons
16665   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
16666   plasma-widget-lancelot
16667   plasma-widgets-addons
16668   plasma-widgets-workspace
16669   polkit-kde-1
16670   ruby1.8
16671   systemsettings
16672   update-notifier-common
16673 </p></blockquote>
16674
16675 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
16676 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
16677 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
16678 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
16679
16680       </div>
16681       <div class="tags">
16682
16683
16684         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>.
16685
16686
16687       </div>
16688     </div>
16689     <div class="padding"></div>
16690
16691     <div class="entry">
16692       <div class="title">
16693         <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>
16694       </div>
16695       <div class="date">
16696         22nd November 2010
16697       </div>
16698       <div class="body">
16699         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
16700 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
16701 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
16702 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
16703 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
16704 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
16705 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
16706 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
16707 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
16708
16709 <p>I found
16710 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
16711 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
16712 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
16713 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
16714 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
16715 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
16716
16717 <pre>
16718 #!/bin/sh
16719
16720 # Based on
16721 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
16722
16723 set -e
16724 set -x
16725
16726 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
16727     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
16728     exit 1
16729 else
16730     host="$1"
16731 fi
16732
16733 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
16734     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
16735     exit 1
16736 fi
16737
16738 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
16739 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
16740 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
16741 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
16742
16743 img=$host.img
16744 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
16745 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
16746
16747 parted $img mklabel msdos
16748 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
16749 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
16750 parted $img set 1 boot on
16751
16752 modprobe dm-mod
16753 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
16754 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
16755
16756 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
16757 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
16758 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
16759
16760 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
16761 losetup -d /dev/loop0
16762 </pre>
16763
16764 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
16765 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
16766
16767 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
16768 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
16769 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
16770 seem to work just fine.</p>
16771
16772       </div>
16773       <div class="tags">
16774
16775
16776         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>.
16777
16778
16779       </div>
16780     </div>
16781     <div class="padding"></div>
16782
16783     <div class="entry">
16784       <div class="title">
16785         <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>
16786       </div>
16787       <div class="date">
16788         20th November 2010
16789       </div>
16790       <div class="body">
16791         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
16792 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
16793 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
16794 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
16795
16796 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
16797 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
16798 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
16799
16800 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
16801
16802 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16803
16804 <blockquote><p>
16805   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
16806   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
16807   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
16808   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
16809   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
16810   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
16811   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
16812   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
16813   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
16814   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
16815   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
16816   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
16817   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
16818   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
16819   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
16820   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
16821   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
16822   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
16823   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
16824   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
16825   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
16826   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
16827   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
16828   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
16829   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
16830   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
16831   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
16832   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
16833   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
16834   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
16835   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
16836   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
16837   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
16838   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
16839   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
16840   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
16841   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
16842   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
16843   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
16844   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
16845   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
16846   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
16847   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
16848   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
16849   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
16850   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
16851   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
16852   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
16853   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
16854   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
16855   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
16856   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
16857   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
16858   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
16859   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
16860   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
16861   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
16862   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
16863   zip
16864 </p></blockquote>
16865
16866 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
16867
16868 <blockquote><p>
16869   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
16870   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
16871   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
16872   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
16873   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
16874   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
16875   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
16876   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
16877   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
16878   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
16879   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
16880   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
16881   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
16882   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
16883   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
16884   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
16885   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
16886   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
16887   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
16888   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
16889   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
16890   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
16891   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
16892   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
16893   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
16894   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
16895   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
16896   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
16897   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
16898 </p></blockquote>
16899
16900 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16901
16902 <blockquote><p>
16903   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
16904 </p></blockquote>
16905
16906 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
16907
16908 <blockquote><p>
16909 [nothing]
16910 </p></blockquote>
16911
16912 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
16913
16914 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16915
16916 <blockquote><p>
16917   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
16918   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
16919   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
16920   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
16921   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
16922   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
16923   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
16924   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
16925   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
16926   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
16927   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
16928   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
16929   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
16930   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
16931   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
16932   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
16933   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
16934   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
16935   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
16936   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
16937   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
16938   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
16939   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
16940   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
16941   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
16942   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
16943   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
16944   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
16945   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
16946   ttf-sazanami-gothic
16947 </p></blockquote>
16948
16949 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
16950
16951 <blockquote><p>
16952   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
16953   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
16954   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
16955   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
16956   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
16957   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
16958   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
16959   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
16960   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
16961   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
16962   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
16963   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
16964   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
16965   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
16966   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
16967   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
16968   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
16969   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
16970   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
16971   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
16972   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
16973   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
16974   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
16975   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
16976   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
16977   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
16978   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
16979   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
16980   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
16981   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
16982   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
16983   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
16984   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
16985 </p></blockquote>
16986
16987 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
16988
16989 <blockquote><p>
16990   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
16991   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
16992   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
16993   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
16994   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
16995   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
16996   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
16997 </p></blockquote>
16998
16999 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17000
17001 <blockquote><p>
17002   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
17003 </p></blockquote>
17004
17005       </div>
17006       <div class="tags">
17007
17008
17009         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>.
17010
17011
17012       </div>
17013     </div>
17014     <div class="padding"></div>
17015
17016     <div class="entry">
17017       <div class="title">
17018         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
17019       </div>
17020       <div class="date">
17021         20th November 2010
17022       </div>
17023       <div class="body">
17024         <p>Answering
17025 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
17026 call from the Gnash project</a> for
17027 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
17028 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
17029 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
17030 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
17031 releases out more often.</p>
17032
17033 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
17034 I have considered setting up a <a
17035 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
17036 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
17037 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
17038 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
17039 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
17040 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
17041 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
17042 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
17043 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
17044 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
17045 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
17046 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
17047
17048       </div>
17049       <div class="tags">
17050
17051
17052         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>.
17053
17054
17055       </div>
17056     </div>
17057     <div class="padding"></div>
17058
17059     <div class="entry">
17060       <div class="title">
17061         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
17062       </div>
17063       <div class="date">
17064          9th November 2010
17065       </div>
17066       <div class="body">
17067         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
17068
17069 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
17070 3D linked in from
17071 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
17072 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
17073
17074       </div>
17075       <div class="tags">
17076
17077
17078         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>.
17079
17080
17081       </div>
17082     </div>
17083     <div class="padding"></div>
17084
17085     <div class="entry">
17086       <div class="title">
17087         <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>
17088       </div>
17089       <div class="date">
17090          7th November 2010
17091       </div>
17092       <div class="body">
17093         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
17094 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
17095 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
17096 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
17097 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
17098 working using this DVD.</p>
17099
17100 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
17101 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
17102 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
17103 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
17104 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
17105 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
17106 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
17107
17108 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
17109 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
17110 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
17111 Debian archive.</p>
17112
17113 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
17114 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
17115 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
17116 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
17117 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
17118 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
17119 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
17120 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
17121 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
17122 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
17123 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
17124 free X driver should work.</p>
17125
17126 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
17127 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
17128 DVD more useful again.</p>
17129
17130       </div>
17131       <div class="tags">
17132
17133
17134         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>.
17135
17136
17137       </div>
17138     </div>
17139     <div class="padding"></div>
17140
17141     <div class="entry">
17142       <div class="title">
17143         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
17144       </div>
17145       <div class="date">
17146         24th October 2010
17147       </div>
17148       <div class="body">
17149         <p>Some updates.</p>
17150
17151 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
17152 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
17153 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
17154 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
17155 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
17156 :)</p>
17157
17158 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
17159 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
17160 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
17161 It is called
17162 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
17163 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
17164 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
17165 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
17166 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
17167 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
17168
17169 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
17170 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
17171 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
17172 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
17173 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
17174 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
17175 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
17176 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
17177 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
17178 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
17179
17180       </div>
17181       <div class="tags">
17182
17183
17184         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>.
17185
17186
17187       </div>
17188     </div>
17189     <div class="padding"></div>
17190
17191     <div class="entry">
17192       <div class="title">
17193         <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>
17194       </div>
17195       <div class="date">
17196         19th October 2010
17197       </div>
17198       <div class="body">
17199         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
17200 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
17201 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
17202 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
17203 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
17204 AVM2 flash files.</p>
17205
17206 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
17207 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
17208 following text:</P>
17209
17210 <p><blockquote>
17211
17212   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
17213   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
17214
17215   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
17216
17217   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
17218
17219   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
17220   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
17221   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
17222   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
17223   days. The project web page is available from
17224   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
17225   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
17226   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
17227
17228   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
17229   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
17230   to get this to happen.</p>
17231
17232   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
17233   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
17234
17235 </blockquote></p>
17236
17237 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
17238 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
17239 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
17240 :)</p>
17241
17242       </div>
17243       <div class="tags">
17244
17245
17246         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>.
17247
17248
17249       </div>
17250     </div>
17251     <div class="padding"></div>
17252
17253     <div class="entry">
17254       <div class="title">
17255         <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>
17256       </div>
17257       <div class="date">
17258          9th October 2010
17259       </div>
17260       <div class="body">
17261         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
17262 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
17263 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
17264 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
17265 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
17266 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
17267 robots.</p>
17268
17269 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
17270 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
17271 a few less important features too.</p>
17272
17273 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
17274 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
17275 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
17276 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
17277
17278 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
17279 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
17280 source or binary package:</p>
17281
17282 <p><ul>
17283 <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>
17284 <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>
17285 <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>
17286 </ul></p>
17287
17288 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
17289 please let me know.</p>
17290
17291       </div>
17292       <div class="tags">
17293
17294
17295         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>.
17296
17297
17298       </div>
17299     </div>
17300     <div class="padding"></div>
17301
17302     <div class="entry">
17303       <div class="title">
17304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
17305       </div>
17306       <div class="date">
17307          3rd October 2010
17308       </div>
17309       <div class="body">
17310         <p><ul>
17311
17312 <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
17313 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
17314
17315 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
17316 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
17317 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
17318
17319 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
17320 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
17321 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
17322 simple setup.
17323
17324 </ul></p>
17325
17326       </div>
17327       <div class="tags">
17328
17329
17330         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>.
17331
17332
17333       </div>
17334     </div>
17335     <div class="padding"></div>
17336
17337     <div class="entry">
17338       <div class="title">
17339         <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>
17340       </div>
17341       <div class="date">
17342          9th September 2010
17343       </div>
17344       <div class="body">
17345         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
17346 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
17347 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
17348 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
17349 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
17350 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
17351 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
17352 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
17353 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
17354
17355 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
17356 written:</p>
17357
17358 <blockquote>
17359 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
17360 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
17361 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
17362 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
17363 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
17364
17365 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
17366 standard.</p>
17367 </blockquote>
17368
17369 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
17370 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
17371 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
17372 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
17373
17374 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
17375 read
17376 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
17377 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
17378 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
17379 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
17380 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
17381 the issue.  The solution is to support the
17382 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
17383 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
17384 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
17385
17386       </div>
17387       <div class="tags">
17388
17389
17390         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17391
17392
17393       </div>
17394     </div>
17395     <div class="padding"></div>
17396
17397     <div class="entry">
17398       <div class="title">
17399         <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>
17400       </div>
17401       <div class="date">
17402          4th September 2010
17403       </div>
17404       <div class="body">
17405         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
17406 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
17407 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
17408 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
17409 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
17410 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
17411 installed.</p>
17412
17413 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
17414 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
17415 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
17416 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
17417 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
17418 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
17419 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
17420 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
17421 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
17422
17423 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
17424 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
17425 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
17426 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
17427 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
17428 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
17429 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
17430 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
17431 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
17432 pages they want to visit.</p>
17433
17434 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
17435 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
17436 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
17437 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
17438 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
17439 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
17440 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
17441 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
17442 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
17443 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
17444 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
17445
17446       </div>
17447       <div class="tags">
17448
17449
17450         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>.
17451
17452
17453       </div>
17454     </div>
17455     <div class="padding"></div>
17456
17457     <div class="entry">
17458       <div class="title">
17459         <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>
17460       </div>
17461       <div class="date">
17462          1st September 2010
17463       </div>
17464       <div class="body">
17465         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
17466 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
17467 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
17468 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
17469 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
17470 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
17471 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
17472 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
17473 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
17474 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
17475 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
17476 drive around.</p>
17477
17478 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
17479 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
17480
17481 <p><pre>
17482 use Spykee;
17483 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
17484 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
17485 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
17486 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
17487 $spykee->left();
17488 sleep 2;
17489 $spykee->right();
17490 sleep 2;
17491 $spykee->forward();
17492 sleep 2;
17493 $spykee->back();
17494 sleep 2;
17495 $spykee->stop();
17496 </pre></p>
17497
17498 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
17499 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
17500 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
17501 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
17502 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
17503 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
17504 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
17505 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
17506 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
17507 going. :).</p>
17508
17509 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
17510 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
17511 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
17512 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
17513
17514       </div>
17515       <div class="tags">
17516
17517
17518         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>.
17519
17520
17521       </div>
17522     </div>
17523     <div class="padding"></div>
17524
17525     <div class="entry">
17526       <div class="title">
17527         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
17528       </div>
17529       <div class="date">
17530         30th August 2010
17531       </div>
17532       <div class="body">
17533         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
17534 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
17535 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
17536 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
17537 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
17538 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
17539 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
17540
17541 <pre>
17542 % ln foo bar
17543 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
17544 %
17545 </pre>
17546
17547 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
17548 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
17549 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
17550 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
17551 nevertheless. :)</p>
17552
17553 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
17554 git from
17555 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
17556
17557       </div>
17558       <div class="tags">
17559
17560
17561         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>.
17562
17563
17564       </div>
17565     </div>
17566     <div class="padding"></div>
17567
17568     <div class="entry">
17569       <div class="title">
17570         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
17571       </div>
17572       <div class="date">
17573         26th August 2010
17574       </div>
17575       <div class="body">
17576         <p>My file system sematics program
17577 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
17578 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
17579 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
17580 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
17581 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
17582 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
17583 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
17584 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
17585 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
17586 script:</p>
17587
17588 <pre>
17589 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
17590   mode_t retval = 0;
17591   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
17592   if (-1 != fd) {
17593     unlink(name);
17594     struct stat statbuf;
17595     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
17596       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
17597     }
17598     close(fd);
17599   }
17600   return retval;
17601 }
17602
17603 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
17604 int test_umask(void) {
17605   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
17606
17607   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
17608   mode_t newmode;
17609   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
17610     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
17611            newmode);
17612   }
17613   umask(007);
17614   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
17615     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
17616            newmode);
17617   }
17618
17619   umask (orig_umask);
17620   return 0;
17621 }
17622
17623 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
17624   [...]
17625   test_umask();
17626   return 0;
17627 }
17628 </pre>
17629
17630 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
17631
17632 <pre>
17633 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
17634 info: testing symlink creation
17635 info: testing subdirectory creation
17636 info: testing fcntl locking
17637   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17638   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17639   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
17640   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17641   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17642   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
17643 info: testing umask effect on file creation
17644 </pre>
17645
17646 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
17647 result:</p>
17648
17649 <pre>
17650 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
17651 info: testing symlink creation
17652 info: testing subdirectory creation
17653 info: testing fcntl locking
17654   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17655   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17656   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
17657   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
17658   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
17659   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
17660 info: testing umask effect on file creation
17661   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
17662   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
17663 </pre>
17664
17665 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
17666 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
17667 directory.</p>
17668
17669 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
17670 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
17671
17672 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
17673 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
17674 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
17675
17676       </div>
17677       <div class="tags">
17678
17679
17680         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>.
17681
17682
17683       </div>
17684     </div>
17685     <div class="padding"></div>
17686
17687     <div class="entry">
17688       <div class="title">
17689         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
17690       </div>
17691       <div class="date">
17692         15th August 2010
17693       </div>
17694       <div class="body">
17695         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
17696 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
17697 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
17698 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
17699 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
17700 long time.</p>
17701
17702       </div>
17703       <div class="tags">
17704
17705
17706         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>.
17707
17708
17709       </div>
17710     </div>
17711     <div class="padding"></div>
17712
17713     <div class="entry">
17714       <div class="title">
17715         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
17716       </div>
17717       <div class="date">
17718          9th August 2010
17719       </div>
17720       <div class="body">
17721         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
17722 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
17723 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
17724 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
17725 generated configuration.</p>
17726
17727 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
17728 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
17729 without any manual configuration.</p>
17730
17731 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
17732 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
17733 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
17734 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
17735 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
17736 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
17737 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
17738 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
17739 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
17740 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
17741 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
17742 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
17743 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
17744 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
17745 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
17746 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
17747 use.</p>
17748
17749 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
17750 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
17751 working properly out of the box:</p>
17752
17753 <ul>
17754 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
17755 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
17756 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
17757 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
17758 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
17759 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
17760 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
17761 </ul>
17762
17763 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
17764
17765 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
17766 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
17767 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
17768 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
17769 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
17770
17771 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
17772 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
17773 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
17774 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
17775 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
17776 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
17777 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
17778 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
17779
17780 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
17781 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
17782 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
17783 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
17784 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
17785 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
17786 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
17787 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
17788 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
17789 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
17790 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
17791 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
17792 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
17793 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
17794 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
17795 current DNS domain is used.</p>
17796
17797 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
17798 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
17799 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
17800 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
17801 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
17802 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
17803 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
17804 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
17805 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
17806 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
17807 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
17808 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
17809 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
17810
17811 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
17812 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
17813 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
17814 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
17815 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
17816 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
17817 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
17818 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
17819 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
17820 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
17821 do for now. :)</p>
17822
17823 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
17824 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
17825 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
17826 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
17827 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
17828 yet.</p>
17829
17830 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
17831 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
17832
17833 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
17834 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
17835 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
17836 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</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/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</a>
17852       </div>
17853       <div class="date">
17854          8th August 2010
17855       </div>
17856       <div class="body">
17857         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
17858 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
17859 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
17860 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
17861 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
17862 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
17863 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
17864
17865 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
17866 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
17867 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
17868 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
17869 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
17870 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
17871 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
17872
17873 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
17874 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
17875 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
17876 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
17877 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
17878
17879 <pre>
17880 /*
17881  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
17882  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
17883  * directory.
17884  * License: GPL v2 or later
17885  *
17886  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
17887  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
17888 */
17889
17890 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
17891 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
17892 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
17893
17894 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
17895
17896 #include &lt;errno.h>
17897 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
17898 #include &lt;stdio.h>
17899 #include &lt;string.h>
17900 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
17901 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
17902 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
17903 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
17904 #include &lt;unistd.h>
17905
17906 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
17907 /*
17908  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
17909  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
17910  * below.
17911  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
17912  */
17913 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
17914 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
17915   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
17916 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
17917   char *zErrMsg;
17918   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
17919   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
17920   unlink(name);
17921   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
17922   if( rc ){
17923     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
17924     sqlite3_close(db);
17925     return -1;
17926   }
17927
17928   /* create tables */
17929   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
17930   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
17931     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
17932     sqlite3_close(db);
17933     return -1;
17934   }
17935   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
17936   sqlite3_close(db);
17937   return 0;
17938 }
17939 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
17940
17941 /*
17942  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
17943  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
17944  * done in the sqlite3 library.
17945  * See also
17946  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
17947  * POSIX specification
17948  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
17949  */
17950 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
17951   struct flock fl;
17952   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
17953   unlink(name);
17954   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
17955   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
17956
17957   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
17958   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
17959   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
17960   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17961   fl.l_len    = 1;
17962   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
17963   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17964
17965   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
17966   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
17967   fl.l_len    = 510;
17968   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
17969   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17970
17971   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
17972   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17973   fl.l_len    = 1;
17974   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
17975   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17976
17977   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
17978   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17979   fl.l_len    = 1;
17980   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
17981   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17982
17983   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
17984   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
17985   fl.l_len    = 510;
17986   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17987
17988   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
17989   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
17990   fl.l_len    = 2;
17991   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
17992   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
17993
17994   close(fd);
17995   return 0;
17996 }
17997
17998 /*
17999  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
18000  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
18001  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
18002  * slowing down file operations.
18003  */
18004 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
18005 #define LEVELS 5
18006   char *path = strdup("test");
18007   char *dirs[LEVELS];
18008   int level;
18009   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
18010   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
18011     char *newpath = NULL;
18012     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
18013       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
18014              path, strerror(errno));
18015       break;
18016     }
18017     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
18018     free(path);
18019     path = newpath;
18020   }
18021   return 0;
18022 }
18023
18024 /*
18025  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
18026  * KDE.
18027  */
18028 int test_symlinks(void) {
18029   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
18030   unlink("symlink");
18031   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
18032     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
18033   return 0;
18034 }
18035
18036 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
18037   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
18038   test_symlinks();
18039   test_subdirectory_creation();
18040 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
18041   test_sqlite_open();
18042 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
18043   test_gcompris_locking();
18044   return 0;
18045 }
18046 </pre>
18047
18048 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
18049 this:</p>
18050
18051 <pre>
18052 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18053 info: testing symlink creation
18054 info: testing subdirectory creation
18055 info: sqlite worked
18056 info: testing fcntl locking
18057   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18058   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18059   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18060   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18061   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18062   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18063 </pre>
18064
18065 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
18066 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
18067 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
18068 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
18069 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
18070 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
18071 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
18072 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
18073
18074 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
18075 it. :)</p>
18076
18077 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
18078 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
18079 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
18080
18081       </div>
18082       <div class="tags">
18083
18084
18085         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>.
18086
18087
18088       </div>
18089     </div>
18090     <div class="padding"></div>
18091
18092     <div class="entry">
18093       <div class="title">
18094         <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>
18095       </div>
18096       <div class="date">
18097          7th August 2010
18098       </div>
18099       <div class="body">
18100         <p>A few days ago, I
18101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
18102 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
18103 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
18104 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
18105 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
18106 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
18107 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
18108 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
18109 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
18110
18111 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
18112 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
18113 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
18114 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
18115 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
18116 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
18117 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
18118 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
18119 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
18120 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
18121 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
18122 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
18123 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
18124 gave it a IP address.</p>
18125
18126 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
18127 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
18128 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
18129 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
18130 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
18131 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
18132 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
18133 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
18134
18135 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
18136 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
18137 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
18138 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
18139 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
18140 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
18141
18142 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
18143 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
18144 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
18145 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
18146 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
18147 with UID and GID values.</p>
18148
18149 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
18150 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18151
18152       </div>
18153       <div class="tags">
18154
18155
18156         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>.
18157
18158
18159       </div>
18160     </div>
18161     <div class="padding"></div>
18162
18163     <div class="entry">
18164       <div class="title">
18165         <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>
18166       </div>
18167       <div class="date">
18168          3rd August 2010
18169       </div>
18170       <div class="body">
18171         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
18172 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
18173 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
18174 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
18175 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
18176 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
18177 servers.</p>
18178
18179 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
18180 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
18181 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
18182 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
18183 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
18184 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
18185 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
18186 .uio.no.</p>
18187
18188 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
18189 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
18190 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
18191 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
18192 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
18193 university servers.</p>
18194
18195 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
18196 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
18197 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
18198 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
18199 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
18200 uses.</p>
18201
18202       </div>
18203       <div class="tags">
18204
18205
18206         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>.
18207
18208
18209       </div>
18210     </div>
18211     <div class="padding"></div>
18212
18213     <div class="entry">
18214       <div class="title">
18215         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
18216       </div>
18217       <div class="date">
18218         27th July 2010
18219       </div>
18220       <div class="body">
18221         <p>I discovered this while doing
18222 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
18223 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
18224 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
18225 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
18226 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
18227
18228 <p>An example is from todays
18229 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
18230 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
18231 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
18232 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
18233 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
18234 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
18235 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
18236
18237 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
18238
18239 <blockquote><pre>
18240 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
18241  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
18242   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
18243 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
18244  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
18245 </pre></blockquote>
18246
18247 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
18248 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
18249 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
18250 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
18251 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
18252 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
18253 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
18254 of dependency loops.</p>
18255
18256 <p>Thanks to
18257 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
18258 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
18259 dependencies
18260 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
18261 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
18262
18263 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
18264 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
18265 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
18266 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
18267 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
18268 it.</p>
18269
18270       </div>
18271       <div class="tags">
18272
18273
18274         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>.
18275
18276
18277       </div>
18278     </div>
18279     <div class="padding"></div>
18280
18281     <div class="entry">
18282       <div class="title">
18283         <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>
18284       </div>
18285       <div class="date">
18286         27th July 2010
18287       </div>
18288       <div class="body">
18289         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
18290 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
18291 completed.</p>
18292
18293 <blockquote>
18294 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
18295 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
18296 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
18297 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
18298 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
18299 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
18300 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
18301 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
18302
18303 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
18304 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
18305 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
18306
18307 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
18308 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
18309 much.</p>
18310
18311 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
18312
18313 <ul>
18314 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
18315 <ul>
18316   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
18317          combination with some new artwork
18318   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
18319   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
18320   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
18321   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
18322   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
18323   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
18324   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
18325   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
18326   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
18327 </ul></li>
18328 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
18329     Enabled for:
18330 <ul>
18331   <li>PAM
18332   <li>LDAP
18333   <li>IMAP
18334   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
18335 </ul>
18336 </li>
18337 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
18338 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
18339     fetched from LDAP.</li>
18340 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
18341 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
18342 </ul>
18343 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
18344
18345 <ul>
18346 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
18347     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
18348     for testing.</li>
18349 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
18350     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
18351     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
18352 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
18353 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
18354 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
18355 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
18356     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
18357 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
18358     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
18359     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
18360 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
18361     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
18362     and help out with translations.</li>
18363 </ul>
18364
18365 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
18366
18367 <ul>
18368 <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>
18369 <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>
18370 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18371 </ul>
18372 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
18373
18374 <ul>
18375 <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>
18376 <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>
18377 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18378 </ul>
18379
18380 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
18381 get closer to the final release.</p>
18382
18383 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
18384
18385 <ul>
18386 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18387 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18388 </ul>
18389
18390 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
18391 <ul>
18392 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18393 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18394 </ul>
18395 <p>How to report bugs:
18396 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
18397
18398 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
18399 </blockquote>
18400
18401       </div>
18402       <div class="tags">
18403
18404
18405         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>.
18406
18407
18408       </div>
18409     </div>
18410     <div class="padding"></div>
18411
18412     <div class="entry">
18413       <div class="title">
18414         <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>
18415       </div>
18416       <div class="date">
18417         25th July 2010
18418       </div>
18419       <div class="body">
18420         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
18421 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
18422 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
18423 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
18424 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
18425
18426 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
18427 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
18428 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
18429 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
18430 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
18431 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
18432 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
18433
18434 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
18435 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
18436 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
18437 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
18438 up. :)</p>
18439
18440 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
18441 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
18442 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
18443
18444 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
18445 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
18446 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
18447 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
18448 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
18449 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
18450 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
18451 release another day.</p>
18452
18453 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
18454 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18455
18456       </div>
18457       <div class="tags">
18458
18459
18460         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>.
18461
18462
18463       </div>
18464     </div>
18465     <div class="padding"></div>
18466
18467     <div class="entry">
18468       <div class="title">
18469         <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>
18470       </div>
18471       <div class="date">
18472         18th July 2010
18473       </div>
18474       <div class="body">
18475         <p>Thanks to
18476 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
18477 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
18478 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
18479 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
18480 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
18481 only available from the development server, until more experience is
18482 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
18483
18484 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
18485 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
18486 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
18487 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
18488 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
18489 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
18490 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
18491
18492       </div>
18493       <div class="tags">
18494
18495
18496         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>.
18497
18498
18499       </div>
18500     </div>
18501     <div class="padding"></div>
18502
18503     <div class="entry">
18504       <div class="title">
18505         <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>
18506       </div>
18507       <div class="date">
18508         17th July 2010
18509       </div>
18510       <div class="body">
18511         <p>This is a
18512 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
18513 on my
18514 <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
18515 work</a> on
18516 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
18517 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
18518
18519 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
18520 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
18521 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
18522 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
18523
18524 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
18525 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
18526 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
18527
18528 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
18529
18530 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
18531 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
18532 the web.
18533
18534 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
18535 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
18536 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
18537 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
18538 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
18539 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
18540
18541 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
18542 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
18543 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
18544 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
18545 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
18546 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
18547 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
18548 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
18549 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
18550 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
18551 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
18552 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
18553 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
18554 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
18555 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
18556 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
18557
18558 <blockquote><pre>
18559 ldapsearch -h ldap \
18560   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
18561   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
18562   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
18563   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
18564   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
18565   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
18566
18567 ldapsearch -h ldap \
18568   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
18569   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
18570   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
18571   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
18572   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
18573 </pre></blockquote>
18574
18575 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
18576 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
18577 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
18578 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18579 also exist.</p>
18580
18581 <blockquote><pre>
18582 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18583 objectclass: top
18584 objectclass: dnsdomain
18585 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18586 dc: tjener
18587 arecord: 10.0.2.2
18588 associateddomain: tjener.intern
18589
18590 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18591 objectclass: top
18592 objectclass: dnsdomain2
18593 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18594 dc: 2
18595 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
18596 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
18597 </pre></blockquote>
18598
18599 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
18600 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
18601 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
18602 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
18603 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
18604 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
18605 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
18606 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
18607 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
18608 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
18609 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
18610 instead.</p>
18611
18612 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
18613 like this:</p>
18614
18615 <blockquote><pre>
18616 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
18617   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
18618   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
18619   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
18620   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
18621   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
18622
18623 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
18624   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
18625 </pre></blockquote>
18626
18627 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
18628 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
18629 reverse lookups.</p>
18630
18631 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
18632 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
18633 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
18634 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
18635
18636 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
18637 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
18638 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
18639
18640 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
18641 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
18642 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
18643 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
18644 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
18645
18646 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
18647 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
18648 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
18649 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
18650 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
18651
18652 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
18653 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
18654 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
18655 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
18656 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
18657 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
18658
18659 <blockquote><pre>
18660 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
18661     SUP top
18662     AUXILIARY
18663     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
18664           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
18665           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
18666           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
18667           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
18668     ))
18669 </pre></blockquote>
18670
18671 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
18672 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
18673 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
18674 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
18675 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
18676 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
18677
18678 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
18679
18680 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
18681 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
18682 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
18683 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
18684 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
18685
18686 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
18687 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
18688 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
18689 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
18690
18691 <blockquote><pre>
18692 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
18693 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
18694 </pre></blockquote>
18695
18696 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
18697 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
18698 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
18699 search result is this entry:</p>
18700
18701 <blockquote><pre>
18702 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18703 cn: dhcp
18704 objectClass: top
18705 objectClass: dhcpServer
18706 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18707 </pre></blockquote>
18708
18709 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
18710 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
18711 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
18712 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
18713 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
18714 The search result is this entry:</p>
18715
18716 <blockquote><pre>
18717 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18718 cn: DHCP Config
18719 objectClass: top
18720 objectClass: dhcpService
18721 objectClass: dhcpOptions
18722 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18723 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
18724 dhcpStatements: authoritative
18725 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
18726 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
18727 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
18728 </pre></blockquote>
18729
18730 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
18731 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
18732 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
18733 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
18734 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
18735 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
18736 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
18737 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
18738 related computer objects.</p>
18739
18740 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
18741 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
18742 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
18743 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
18744 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
18745 like:</p>
18746
18747 <blockquote><pre>
18748 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18749 cn: hostname
18750 objectClass: top
18751 objectClass: dhcpHost
18752 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
18753 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
18754 </pre></blockquote>
18755
18756 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
18757 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
18758 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
18759 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
18760 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
18761 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
18762 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
18763 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
18764 structural object class.
18765
18766 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
18767
18768 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
18769 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
18770 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
18771 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
18772 in the configuration.</p>
18773
18774 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
18775 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
18776 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
18777 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
18778 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
18779 structure.</p>
18780
18781 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
18782 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
18783
18784 <blockquote><pre>
18785 ou=services
18786   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
18787     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
18788     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
18789       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
18790         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
18791     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
18792       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
18793         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
18794     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
18795       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
18796 </pre></blockquote>
18797
18798 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
18799 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
18800 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
18801 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
18802
18803 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
18804 like this:</p>
18805
18806 <blockquote><pre>
18807 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18808 dc: hostname
18809 objectClass: top
18810 objectClass: dhcpHost
18811 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18812 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
18813 associateddomain: hostname.intern
18814 arecord: 10.11.12.13
18815 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
18816 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
18817 </pre></blockquote>
18818
18819 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
18820 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
18821 auxiliary object class.</p>
18822
18823       </div>
18824       <div class="tags">
18825
18826
18827         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>.
18828
18829
18830       </div>
18831     </div>
18832     <div class="padding"></div>
18833
18834     <div class="entry">
18835       <div class="title">
18836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
18837       </div>
18838       <div class="date">
18839         14th July 2010
18840       </div>
18841       <div class="body">
18842         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
18843 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
18844 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
18845 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
18846 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
18847
18848 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
18849 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
18850
18851 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
18852 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
18853 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
18854 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
18855 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
18856 to a slave DNS server.</p>
18857
18858 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
18859 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
18860 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
18861 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
18862 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
18863 seem to work.</p>
18864
18865 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
18866 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
18867 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
18868 this:</p>
18869
18870 <blockquote><pre>
18871   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18872   cn: hostname
18873   objectClass: dhcphost
18874   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
18875   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
18876   associateddomain: hostname.intern
18877   arecord: 10.11.12.13
18878   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
18879   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
18880   ldapconfigsound: Y
18881 </pre></blockquote>
18882
18883 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
18884 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
18885 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
18886 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
18887
18888 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
18889 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
18890 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
18891 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
18892 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
18893 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
18894 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
18895 might be a good place to put it.</p>
18896
18897 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
18898 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18899
18900       </div>
18901       <div class="tags">
18902
18903
18904         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>.
18905
18906
18907       </div>
18908     </div>
18909     <div class="padding"></div>
18910
18911     <div class="entry">
18912       <div class="title">
18913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
18914       </div>
18915       <div class="date">
18916         11th July 2010
18917       </div>
18918       <div class="body">
18919         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
18920 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
18921 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
18922 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
18923
18924 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
18925 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
18926 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
18927 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
18928 LTSP clients.</p>
18929
18930 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
18931 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
18932 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
18933
18934 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
18935 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
18936 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
18937
18938 <blockquote><pre>
18939 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
18940 #
18941 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
18942 #
18943 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
18944 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
18945 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
18946 #
18947 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
18948 # existence of attribute names.
18949 #
18950 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
18951 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
18952 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
18953 #
18954 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
18955 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
18956 #
18957 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
18958 #     SUP top
18959 #     AUXILIARY
18960 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
18961
18962 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
18963 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
18964     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
18965     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
18966         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
18967         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
18968             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
18969             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
18970             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
18971             # bass value on to clients
18972             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
18973         done
18974     done
18975 fi
18976 </pre></blockquote>
18977
18978 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
18979 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
18980 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
18981 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
18982 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
18983
18984 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
18985 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18986
18987 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
18988 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
18989 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
18990 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
18991 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
18992 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
18993
18994       </div>
18995       <div class="tags">
18996
18997
18998         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>.
18999
19000
19001       </div>
19002     </div>
19003     <div class="padding"></div>
19004
19005     <div class="entry">
19006       <div class="title">
19007         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
19008       </div>
19009       <div class="date">
19010          9th July 2010
19011       </div>
19012       <div class="body">
19013         <p>Since
19014 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
19015 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
19016 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
19017 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
19018 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
19019 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
19020 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
19021 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
19022 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
19023 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
19024 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
19025 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
19026 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
19027
19028       </div>
19029       <div class="tags">
19030
19031
19032         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>.
19033
19034
19035       </div>
19036     </div>
19037     <div class="padding"></div>
19038
19039     <div class="entry">
19040       <div class="title">
19041         <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>
19042       </div>
19043       <div class="date">
19044          3rd July 2010
19045       </div>
19046       <div class="body">
19047         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
19048 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
19049 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
19050 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
19051 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
19052 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
19053 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
19054 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
19055
19056 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
19057 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
19058 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
19059 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
19060 publish the difference.</p>
19061
19062 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
19063
19064 <blockquote><p>
19065   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
19066   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
19067   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
19068   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
19069   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
19070   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
19071   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
19072   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
19073 </p></blockquote>
19074
19075 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
19076
19077 <blockquote><p>
19078   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
19079   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
19080   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
19081   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
19082   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
19083   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
19084   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
19085   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
19086   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
19087   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
19088   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
19089   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
19090   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
19091   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
19092   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
19093   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
19094   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
19095   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
19096   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
19097   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
19098 </p></blockquote>
19099
19100 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
19101
19102 <blockquote><p>
19103   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
19104   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
19105   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19106   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19107   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
19108   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
19109   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
19110   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19111   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19112   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19113   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19114   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
19115   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
19116   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
19117   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
19118   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
19119   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
19120   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
19121   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
19122   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
19123   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
19124 </p></blockquote>
19125
19126 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
19127
19128 <blockquote><p>
19129   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
19130   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
19131   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
19132 </p></blockquote>
19133
19134 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
19135 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
19136 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
19137 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
19138 the difference somewhat.
19139
19140       </div>
19141       <div class="tags">
19142
19143
19144         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>.
19145
19146
19147       </div>
19148     </div>
19149     <div class="padding"></div>
19150
19151     <div class="entry">
19152       <div class="title">
19153         <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>
19154       </div>
19155       <div class="date">
19156          1st July 2010
19157       </div>
19158       <div class="body">
19159         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
19160 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
19161 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
19162 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
19163 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
19164 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
19165 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
19166 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
19167 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
19168
19169 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
19170
19171 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
19172 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
19173 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
19174 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
19175 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
19176 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
19177 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
19178 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
19179 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
19180 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
19181 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
19182 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
19183 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
19184 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
19185 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
19186
19187 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
19188
19189 <blockquote><pre>
19190 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
19191 </pre></blockquote>
19192
19193 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
19194 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
19195 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
19196 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
19197 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
19198 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
19199 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
19200 on how to get this working.</p>
19201
19202 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
19203 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
19204 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
19205 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
19206 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
19207 instructions I found in the
19208 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
19209 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
19210
19211 <blockquote><pre>
19212         debug-level             0
19213         reload-count            unlimited
19214         paranoia                no
19215
19216         enable-cache            passwd          yes
19217         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
19218         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
19219         suggested-size          passwd          211
19220         check-files             passwd          yes
19221         persistent              passwd          yes
19222         shared                  passwd          yes
19223         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
19224         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
19225
19226         enable-cache            group           yes
19227         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
19228         negative-time-to-live   group           20
19229         suggested-size          group           211
19230         check-files             group           yes
19231         persistent              group           yes
19232         shared                  group           yes
19233         max-db-size             group           33554432
19234         auto-propagate          group           yes
19235
19236         enable-cache            hosts           no
19237         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
19238         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
19239         suggested-size          hosts           211
19240         check-files             hosts           yes
19241         persistent              hosts           yes
19242         shared                  hosts           yes
19243         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
19244
19245         enable-cache            services        yes
19246         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
19247         negative-time-to-live   services        20
19248         suggested-size          services        211
19249         check-files             services        yes
19250         persistent              services        yes
19251         shared                  services        yes
19252         max-db-size             services        33554432
19253 </pre></blockquote>
19254
19255 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
19256 automatically like the one provided in
19257 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
19258 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
19259 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
19260 look like this:</p>
19261
19262 <blockquote><pre>
19263 passwd:         files ldap
19264 group:          files ldap
19265 shadow:         files ldap
19266 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
19267 networks:       files
19268 protocols:      files
19269 services:       files
19270 ethers:         files
19271 rpc:            files
19272 netgroup:       files ldap
19273 </pre></blockquote>
19274
19275 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
19276 shadow and netgroup.</p>
19277
19278 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
19279 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
19280 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
19281 attributes cached.
19282
19283 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
19284   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
19285
19286 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
19287 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
19288 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
19289 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
19290 discovered sssd.</p>
19291
19292 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
19293
19294 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
19295 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
19296 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
19297 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
19298 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
19299 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
19300 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
19301 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
19302 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
19303 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
19304 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
19305 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
19306 version 1.2 is now in testing.
19307
19308 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
19309 roaming setup I want</p>
19310
19311 <blockquote><pre>
19312 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
19313 </pre></blockquote>
19314
19315 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
19316 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
19317
19318 <blockquote><pre>
19319 [sssd]
19320 config_file_version = 2
19321 reconnection_retries = 3
19322 sbus_timeout = 30
19323 services = nss, pam
19324 domains = INTERN
19325
19326 [nss]
19327 filter_groups = root
19328 filter_users = root
19329 reconnection_retries = 3
19330
19331 [pam]
19332 reconnection_retries = 3
19333
19334 [domain/INTERN]
19335 enumerate = false
19336 cache_credentials = true
19337
19338 id_provider = ldap
19339 auth_provider = ldap
19340 chpass_provider = ldap
19341
19342 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
19343 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19344 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
19345 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
19346 </pre></blockquote>
19347
19348 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
19349 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
19350
19351 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
19352 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
19353 modify it manually.</p>
19354
19355 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19356 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19357
19358       </div>
19359       <div class="tags">
19360
19361
19362         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>.
19363
19364
19365       </div>
19366     </div>
19367     <div class="padding"></div>
19368
19369     <div class="entry">
19370       <div class="title">
19371         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
19372       </div>
19373       <div class="date">
19374         28th June 2010
19375       </div>
19376       <div class="body">
19377         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
19378 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
19379 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
19380 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
19381 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
19382 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
19383 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
19384 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
19385 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
19386 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
19387
19388 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
19389 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
19390 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
19391 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
19392 released.</p>
19393
19394 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
19395 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
19396 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
19397 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
19398
19399 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
19400 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19401
19402 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
19403 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
19404 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
19405 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
19406 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
19407
19408       </div>
19409       <div class="tags">
19410
19411
19412         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>.
19413
19414
19415       </div>
19416     </div>
19417     <div class="padding"></div>
19418
19419     <div class="entry">
19420       <div class="title">
19421         <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>
19422       </div>
19423       <div class="date">
19424         24th June 2010
19425       </div>
19426       <div class="body">
19427         <p>A while back, I
19428 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
19429 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
19430 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
19431 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
19432
19433 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
19434 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
19435 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
19436 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
19437
19438 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
19439 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
19440 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
19441 Debian Edu.</p>
19442
19443 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
19444 the
19445 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
19446 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
19447 available today from IETF.</p>
19448
19449 <pre>
19450 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
19451 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
19452 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
19453  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
19454         NAME 'dhcpHost'
19455         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
19456 -       SUP top
19457 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
19458         MUST cn
19459         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
19460         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
19461 </pre>
19462
19463 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
19464 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
19465 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
19466
19467 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19468 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19469
19470       </div>
19471       <div class="tags">
19472
19473
19474         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>.
19475
19476
19477       </div>
19478     </div>
19479     <div class="padding"></div>
19480
19481     <div class="entry">
19482       <div class="title">
19483         <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>
19484       </div>
19485       <div class="date">
19486         16th June 2010
19487       </div>
19488       <div class="body">
19489         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
19490 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
19491 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
19492 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
19493 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
19494 this:
19495
19496 <blockquote><pre>
19497 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
19498 tasksel --new-install
19499 </pre></blockquote>
19500
19501 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
19502 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
19503 any output what so ever.
19504
19505 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
19506 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
19507 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
19508 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
19509 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
19510 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
19511 code like this:
19512
19513 <blockquote><pre>
19514 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
19515 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
19516 $cmd
19517 </pre></blockquote>
19518
19519 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
19520 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
19521 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
19522 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
19523 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
19524 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
19525 installation.</p>
19526
19527 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
19528 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
19529 like this.</p>
19530
19531       </div>
19532       <div class="tags">
19533
19534
19535         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>.
19536
19537
19538       </div>
19539     </div>
19540     <div class="padding"></div>
19541
19542     <div class="entry">
19543       <div class="title">
19544         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
19545       </div>
19546       <div class="date">
19547         13th June 2010
19548       </div>
19549       <div class="body">
19550         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
19551 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
19552 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
19553 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
19554 pages.</p>
19555
19556 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
19557 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
19558 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
19559 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
19560 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
19561 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
19562 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
19563 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
19564 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
19565 see how the project is doing.</p>
19566
19567 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
19568 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
19569 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
19570 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
19571 Windows.  This is great.</p>
19572
19573       </div>
19574       <div class="tags">
19575
19576
19577         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>.
19578
19579
19580       </div>
19581     </div>
19582     <div class="padding"></div>
19583
19584     <div class="entry">
19585       <div class="title">
19586         <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>
19587       </div>
19588       <div class="date">
19589         13th June 2010
19590       </div>
19591       <div class="body">
19592         <p>My
19593 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
19594 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
19595 finally made the upgrade logs available from
19596 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
19597 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
19598 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
19599 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
19600
19601 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
19602 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
19603 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
19604 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
19605 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
19606 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
19607 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
19608 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
19609
19610 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
19611 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
19612 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
19613 too surprising.</p>
19614
19615 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
19616 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
19617 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
19618 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
19619 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
19620 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
19621 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
19622 continue.</p>
19623
19624 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
19625 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
19626   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
19627   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
19628   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
19629   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
19630   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
19631   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19632   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19633   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
19634   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
19635   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
19636   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
19637   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19638   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19639   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19640   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19641   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19642   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
19643   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
19644   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
19645   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
19646   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
19647   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
19648   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
19649   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
19650   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
19651   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
19652   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
19653   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
19654
19655 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
19656
19657 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
19658   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
19659   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
19660   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
19661   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
19662   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
19663   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
19664   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
19665   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
19666   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
19667   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
19668   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
19669   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
19670   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
19671   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
19672   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
19673   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
19674   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
19675   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
19676   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
19677   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
19678   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
19679   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
19680   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
19681   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
19682   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
19683   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
19684   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
19685   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
19686   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19687   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
19688   zip</p>
19689
19690 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
19691
19692 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
19693   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
19694   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
19695   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
19696   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
19697   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
19698   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19699   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19700   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
19701   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
19702   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
19703   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
19704   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19705   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19706   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19707   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19708   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19709   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
19710   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
19711   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
19712   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
19713   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
19714   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
19715   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
19716   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
19717   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
19718   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
19719   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
19720
19721 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
19722 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
19723   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
19724   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
19725   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
19726   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
19727   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
19728   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
19729   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
19730   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
19731   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
19732   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
19733   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
19734   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
19735   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
19736   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
19737   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
19738   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
19739   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
19740   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
19741   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
19742   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
19743   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
19744   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
19745   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
19746   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
19747   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
19748   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
19749   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
19750   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
19751   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
19752   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
19753   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
19754   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
19755   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
19756   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
19757   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
19758   xulrunner-1.9</p>
19759
19760
19761       </div>
19762       <div class="tags">
19763
19764
19765         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>.
19766
19767
19768       </div>
19769     </div>
19770     <div class="padding"></div>
19771
19772     <div class="entry">
19773       <div class="title">
19774         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
19775       </div>
19776       <div class="date">
19777         11th June 2010
19778       </div>
19779       <div class="body">
19780         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
19781 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
19782 have been discovered and reported in the process
19783 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
19784 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
19785 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
19786 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
19787 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
19788
19789 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
19790 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
19791 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
19792 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
19793 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
19794 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
19795
19796 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
19797 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
19798 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
19799 is created.  The bug report
19800 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
19801 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
19802 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
19803 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
19804 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
19805 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
19806 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
19807 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
19808 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
19809 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
19810 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
19811 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
19812 Debian Squeeze.</p>
19813
19814 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
19815 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
19816 trick:</p>
19817
19818 <blockquote><pre>
19819 #!/bin/sh
19820 set -ex
19821
19822 if [ "$1" ] ; then
19823     desktop=$1
19824 else
19825     desktop=gnome
19826 fi
19827
19828 from=lenny
19829 to=squeeze
19830
19831 exec &lt; /dev/null
19832 unset LANG
19833 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
19834 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
19835 fuser -mv .
19836 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
19837 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
19838 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
19839 #!/bin/sh
19840 exit 101
19841 EOF
19842 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
19843 exit_cleanup() {
19844     umount $tmpdir/proc
19845 }
19846 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
19847 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
19848 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
19849
19850 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
19851
19852 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
19853 # to return the correct answers.
19854 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
19855     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
19856
19857 # Include the desktop and laptop task
19858 for test in desktop laptop ; do
19859     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
19860 #!/bin/sh
19861 exit 2
19862 EOF
19863     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
19864 done
19865
19866 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
19867 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
19868 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
19869 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
19870
19871 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
19872 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
19873 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
19874 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
19875 fuser -mv
19876 </pre></blockquote>
19877
19878 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
19879 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
19880 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
19881 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
19882 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
19883 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
19884
19885 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
19886 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
19887 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
19888 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
19889 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
19890 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
19891 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
19892
19893 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
19894 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
19895 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
19896 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
19897 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
19898 packages.</p>
19899
19900       </div>
19901       <div class="tags">
19902
19903
19904         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>.
19905
19906
19907       </div>
19908     </div>
19909     <div class="padding"></div>
19910
19911     <div class="entry">
19912       <div class="title">
19913         <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>
19914       </div>
19915       <div class="date">
19916          6th June 2010
19917       </div>
19918       <div class="body">
19919         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
19920 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
19921 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
19922 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
19923 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
19924 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
19925 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
19926
19927 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
19928 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
19929 COLUMNS):</p>
19930
19931 <blockquote><pre>
19932 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
19933 previous=N
19934 PREVLEVEL=
19935 RUNLEVEL=
19936 runlevel=S
19937 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
19938 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
19939 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
19940 </pre></blockquote>
19941
19942 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
19943 script.</p>
19944
19945 <blockquote><pre>
19946 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
19947 previous=N
19948 PREVLEVEL=N
19949 RUNLEVEL=S
19950 runlevel=S
19951 </pre></blockquote>
19952
19953 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
19954 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
19955 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
19956
19957 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
19958 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
19959 choice.</p>
19960
19961       </div>
19962       <div class="tags">
19963
19964
19965         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>.
19966
19967
19968       </div>
19969     </div>
19970     <div class="padding"></div>
19971
19972     <div class="entry">
19973       <div class="title">
19974         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
19975       </div>
19976       <div class="date">
19977          6th June 2010
19978       </div>
19979       <div class="body">
19980         <p>Via the
19981 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
19982 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
19983 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
19984 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
19985 following the standards wars of today.</p>
19986
19987       </div>
19988       <div class="tags">
19989
19990
19991         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>.
19992
19993
19994       </div>
19995     </div>
19996     <div class="padding"></div>
19997
19998     <div class="entry">
19999       <div class="title">
20000         <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>
20001       </div>
20002       <div class="date">
20003          3rd June 2010
20004       </div>
20005       <div class="body">
20006         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
20007 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
20008 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
20009 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
20010 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
20011
20012 <blockquote><pre>
20013 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
20014   vendor                    count
20015   Dell Computer Corporation     1
20016     PowerEdge 1750              1
20017   IBM                           1
20018     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
20019   Intel                         2
20020   [no-dmi-info]                 3
20021 maintainer:~#
20022 </pre></blockquote>
20023
20024 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
20025 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
20026 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
20027 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
20028 option to list the individual machines.</p>
20029
20030 <p>A larger list is
20031 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
20032 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
20033 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
20034 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
20035 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
20036 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
20037 collector.</p>
20038
20039       </div>
20040       <div class="tags">
20041
20042
20043         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>.
20044
20045
20046       </div>
20047     </div>
20048     <div class="padding"></div>
20049
20050     <div class="entry">
20051       <div class="title">
20052         <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>
20053       </div>
20054       <div class="date">
20055          1st June 2010
20056       </div>
20057       <div class="body">
20058         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
20059 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
20060 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
20061 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
20062 wait.</p>
20063
20064 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
20065 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
20066 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
20067 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
20068 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
20069 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
20070
20071 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
20072 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
20073 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
20074 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
20075 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
20076 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
20077 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
20078 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
20079
20080 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
20081
20082       </div>
20083       <div class="tags">
20084
20085
20086         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>.
20087
20088
20089       </div>
20090     </div>
20091     <div class="padding"></div>
20092
20093     <div class="entry">
20094       <div class="title">
20095         <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>
20096       </div>
20097       <div class="date">
20098         27th May 2010
20099       </div>
20100       <div class="body">
20101         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
20102 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
20103 issues are known and should be solved:
20104
20105 <p><ul>
20106
20107 <li>The wicd package seen to
20108 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
20109 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
20110 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
20111 seem to be on the case.</li>
20112
20113 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
20114 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
20115 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
20116 maintainer is on the case.</li>
20117
20118 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
20119 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
20120 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
20121 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
20122 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
20123 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
20124 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
20125 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
20126
20127 </ul></p>
20128
20129 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
20130 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
20131 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
20132 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
20133
20134 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20135 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20136 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20137 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20138
20139 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
20140
20141       </div>
20142       <div class="tags">
20143
20144
20145         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>.
20146
20147
20148       </div>
20149     </div>
20150     <div class="padding"></div>
20151
20152     <div class="entry">
20153       <div class="title">
20154         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
20155       </div>
20156       <div class="date">
20157         22nd May 2010
20158       </div>
20159       <div class="body">
20160         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
20161 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
20162 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
20163 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
20164
20165 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
20166 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
20167 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
20168 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
20169 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
20170 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
20171 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
20172 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
20173 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
20174 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
20175 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
20176 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
20177 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
20178 going to work.</p>
20179
20180 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
20181 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
20182 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
20183 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
20184 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
20185 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
20186 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
20187 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
20188 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
20189 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
20190 Edu.</p>
20191
20192 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
20193 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
20194 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
20195 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
20196 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
20197 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
20198
20199 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
20200 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
20201
20202       </div>
20203       <div class="tags">
20204
20205
20206         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>.
20207
20208
20209       </div>
20210     </div>
20211     <div class="padding"></div>
20212
20213     <div class="entry">
20214       <div class="title">
20215         <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>
20216       </div>
20217       <div class="date">
20218         19th May 2010
20219       </div>
20220       <div class="body">
20221         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
20222 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
20223 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
20224 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
20225 into unstable.  The
20226 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
20227 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
20228 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
20229 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
20230 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
20231 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
20232 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
20233
20234 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
20235 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
20236 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
20237 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
20238 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
20239 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
20240 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
20241 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
20242
20243 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
20244 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
20245 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
20246 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
20247 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
20248 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
20249 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
20250
20251 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
20252 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
20253 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
20254 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
20255 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
20256 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
20257 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
20258 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
20259 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
20260 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
20261 on the home directory servers.</p>
20262
20263 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
20264 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
20265 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
20266 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
20267 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
20268 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
20269
20270 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20271 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20272
20273       </div>
20274       <div class="tags">
20275
20276
20277         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>.
20278
20279
20280       </div>
20281     </div>
20282     <div class="padding"></div>
20283
20284     <div class="entry">
20285       <div class="title">
20286         <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>
20287       </div>
20288       <div class="date">
20289         14th May 2010
20290       </div>
20291       <div class="body">
20292         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
20293 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
20294 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
20295 expected, if I am to believe the
20296 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
20297 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
20298 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
20299 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
20300 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
20301 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
20302 version.</p>
20303
20304 More information about
20305 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
20306 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
20307 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
20308 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
20309
20310 <blockquote><pre>
20311 CONCURRENCY=none
20312 </pre></blockquote>
20313
20314 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20315 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20316 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20317 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20318
20319       </div>
20320       <div class="tags">
20321
20322
20323         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>.
20324
20325
20326       </div>
20327     </div>
20328     <div class="padding"></div>
20329
20330     <div class="entry">
20331       <div class="title">
20332         <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>
20333       </div>
20334       <div class="date">
20335         14th May 2010
20336       </div>
20337       <div class="body">
20338         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
20339 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
20340 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
20341 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
20342 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
20343 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
20344 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
20345 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
20346
20347 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
20348 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
20349 this on the collector host:</p>
20350
20351 <blockquote><pre>
20352 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
20353 </pre></blockquote>
20354
20355 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
20356 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
20357
20358 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
20359 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
20360 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
20361 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
20362 written yet.</p>
20363
20364       </div>
20365       <div class="tags">
20366
20367
20368         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>.
20369
20370
20371       </div>
20372     </div>
20373     <div class="padding"></div>
20374
20375     <div class="entry">
20376       <div class="title">
20377         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
20378       </div>
20379       <div class="date">
20380         13th May 2010
20381       </div>
20382       <div class="body">
20383         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
20384 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
20385 has been
20386 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
20387
20388 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
20389 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
20390 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
20391 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
20392 based boot system.  Tollef is
20393 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
20394 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
20395 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
20396 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
20397 at the moment do not.</p>
20398
20399 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
20400 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
20401 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
20402 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
20403 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
20404 way forward.</p>
20405
20406 <p>In the mean time, based on the
20407 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
20408 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
20409 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
20410 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
20411 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
20412 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
20413 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
20414 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
20415
20416       </div>
20417       <div class="tags">
20418
20419
20420         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>.
20421
20422
20423       </div>
20424     </div>
20425     <div class="padding"></div>
20426
20427     <div class="entry">
20428       <div class="title">
20429         <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>
20430       </div>
20431       <div class="date">
20432          6th May 2010
20433       </div>
20434       <div class="body">
20435         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
20436 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
20437 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
20438 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
20439 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
20440 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
20441 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
20442
20443 <blockquote><pre>
20444 CONCURRENCY=makefile
20445 </pre></blockquote>
20446
20447 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
20448 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
20449 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
20450 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
20451 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
20452 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
20453 make this happen.</p>
20454
20455 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
20456 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
20457 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
20458 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
20459 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
20460
20461 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
20462 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
20463 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
20464 fix the remaining issues.</p>
20465
20466 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20467 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20468 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20469 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20470
20471       </div>
20472       <div class="tags">
20473
20474
20475         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>.
20476
20477
20478       </div>
20479     </div>
20480     <div class="padding"></div>
20481
20482     <div class="entry">
20483       <div class="title">
20484         <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>
20485       </div>
20486       <div class="date">
20487          2nd May 2010
20488       </div>
20489       <div class="body">
20490         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
20491 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
20492 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
20493
20494 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
20495 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
20496 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
20497 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
20498 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
20499
20500 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
20501 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
20502
20503 <blockquote><pre>
20504 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
20505 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
20506 Password expires                                        : never
20507 Password inactive                                       : never
20508 Account expires                                         : never
20509 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
20510 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
20511 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
20512 root@tjener:~#
20513 </pre></blockquote>
20514
20515 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
20516 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
20517 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
20518 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
20519 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
20520 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
20521
20522 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
20523 intended:</p>
20524
20525 <blockquote><pre>
20526 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
20527 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
20528 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
20529 Password expires                                        : never
20530 Password inactive                                       : never
20531 Account expires                                         : never
20532 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
20533 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
20534 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
20535 root@tjener:~#
20536 </pre></blockquote>
20537
20538 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
20539 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
20540 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
20541
20542 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
20543 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
20544
20545 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
20546 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20547
20548 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
20549 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
20550 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
20551 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
20552 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
20553 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
20554 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
20555
20556 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
20557 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
20558 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
20559 change.</p>
20560
20561       </div>
20562       <div class="tags">
20563
20564
20565         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>.
20566
20567
20568       </div>
20569     </div>
20570     <div class="padding"></div>
20571
20572     <div class="entry">
20573       <div class="title">
20574         <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>
20575       </div>
20576       <div class="date">
20577         28th April 2010
20578       </div>
20579       <div class="body">
20580         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
20581 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
20582 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
20583 and go.</p>
20584
20585 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
20586 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
20587 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
20588 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
20589
20590 <ul>
20591
20592  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
20593    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
20594    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
20595    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
20596    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
20597    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
20598    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
20599    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
20600    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
20601    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
20602    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
20603    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
20604
20605  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
20606    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
20607    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
20608    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
20609    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
20610    or the Fedora developed
20611    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
20612    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
20613
20614  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
20615    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
20616    directory, using unison.</li>
20617
20618  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
20619    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
20620    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
20621    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
20622    implemented.</li>
20623
20624  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
20625    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
20626
20627  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
20628    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
20629    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
20630
20631 </ul>
20632
20633 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
20634 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
20635 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
20636 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
20637 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
20638 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
20639 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
20640 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
20641 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
20642
20643 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20644 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20645
20646       </div>
20647       <div class="tags">
20648
20649
20650         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>.
20651
20652
20653       </div>
20654     </div>
20655     <div class="padding"></div>
20656
20657     <div class="entry">
20658       <div class="title">
20659         <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>
20660       </div>
20661       <div class="date">
20662         19th April 2010
20663       </div>
20664       <div class="body">
20665         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
20666 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
20667 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
20668 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
20669 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
20670 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
20671 restrictions on the web, for example from
20672 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
20673 epub-version from
20674 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
20675 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
20676 strongly recommend this book.</p>
20677
20678       </div>
20679       <div class="tags">
20680
20681
20682         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>.
20683
20684
20685       </div>
20686     </div>
20687     <div class="padding"></div>
20688
20689     <div class="entry">
20690       <div class="title">
20691         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
20692       </div>
20693       <div class="date">
20694         14th April 2010
20695       </div>
20696       <div class="body">
20697         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
20698 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
20699 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
20700 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
20701 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
20702 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
20703 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
20704 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
20705 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
20706
20707 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
20708 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
20709 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
20710 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
20711 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
20712
20713 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
20714 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
20715
20716 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
20717 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
20718 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
20719 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
20720 to work properly.</p>
20721
20722 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
20723 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
20724 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
20725 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
20726 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
20727 time.</p>
20728
20729 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
20730 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
20731 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
20732 up in a few days.</p>
20733
20734       </div>
20735       <div class="tags">
20736
20737
20738         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>.
20739
20740
20741       </div>
20742     </div>
20743     <div class="padding"></div>
20744
20745     <div class="entry">
20746       <div class="title">
20747         <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>
20748       </div>
20749       <div class="date">
20750          6th March 2010
20751       </div>
20752       <div class="body">
20753         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
20754 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
20755 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
20756 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
20757 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
20758 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
20759
20760 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
20761 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
20762 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
20763 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
20764
20765 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
20766 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
20767 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
20768 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
20769 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
20770 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
20771
20772       </div>
20773       <div class="tags">
20774
20775
20776         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>.
20777
20778
20779       </div>
20780     </div>
20781     <div class="padding"></div>
20782
20783     <div class="entry">
20784       <div class="title">
20785         <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>
20786       </div>
20787       <div class="date">
20788         11th February 2010
20789       </div>
20790       <div class="body">
20791         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
20792 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
20793 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
20794 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
20795 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
20796 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
20797 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
20798
20799 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
20800
20801 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
20802 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
20803 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
20804 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
20805
20806       </div>
20807       <div class="tags">
20808
20809
20810         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>.
20811
20812
20813       </div>
20814     </div>
20815     <div class="padding"></div>
20816
20817     <div class="entry">
20818       <div class="title">
20819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
20820       </div>
20821       <div class="date">
20822         27th January 2010
20823       </div>
20824       <div class="body">
20825         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
20826 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
20827 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
20828 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
20829 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
20830 further.</p>
20831
20832 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
20833 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
20834 configured to be a server for the
20835 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
20836 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
20837 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
20838 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
20839 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
20840 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
20841 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
20842 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
20843 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
20844 and Nagios configuration.</p>
20845
20846 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
20847 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
20848 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
20849 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
20850
20851 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
20852 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
20853 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
20854 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
20855 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
20856 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
20857 the machine.</p>
20858
20859 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
20860 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
20861 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
20862 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
20863
20864 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
20865 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
20866 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
20867 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
20868 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
20869 everything is taken care of.</p>
20870
20871       </div>
20872       <div class="tags">
20873
20874
20875         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>.
20876
20877
20878       </div>
20879     </div>
20880     <div class="padding"></div>
20881
20882     <div class="entry">
20883       <div class="title">
20884         <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>
20885       </div>
20886       <div class="date">
20887         12th August 2009
20888       </div>
20889       <div class="body">
20890         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
20891 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
20892 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
20893 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
20894
20895 <table>
20896 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20897 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
20898 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
20899 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
20900 </table>
20901
20902 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
20903 got these numbers:</p>
20904
20905 <table>
20906 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20907 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
20908 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
20909 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
20910 </table>
20911
20912 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
20913
20914 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
20915 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
20916 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
20917 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
20918 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
20919
20920
20921 <table>
20922 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20923 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
20924 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
20925 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
20926 </table>
20927
20928 <p>And with 'site:no':
20929
20930 <table>
20931 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
20932 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
20933 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
20934 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
20935 </table>
20936
20937 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
20938 numbers.</p>
20939
20940       </div>
20941       <div class="tags">
20942
20943
20944         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>.
20945
20946
20947       </div>
20948     </div>
20949     <div class="padding"></div>
20950
20951     <div class="entry">
20952       <div class="title">
20953         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
20954       </div>
20955       <div class="date">
20956          8th August 2009
20957       </div>
20958       <div class="body">
20959         <p>According to <a
20960 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
20961 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
20962 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
20963 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
20964 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
20965 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
20966 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
20967 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
20968 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
20969 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
20970
20971 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
20972 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
20973 seminar this autumn.</p>
20974
20975       </div>
20976       <div class="tags">
20977
20978
20979         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>.
20980
20981
20982       </div>
20983     </div>
20984     <div class="padding"></div>
20985
20986     <div class="entry">
20987       <div class="title">
20988         <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>
20989       </div>
20990       <div class="date">
20991         27th July 2009
20992       </div>
20993       <div class="body">
20994         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
20995 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
20996 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
20997 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
20998 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
20999 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
21000 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
21001
21002 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
21003 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
21004 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
21005
21006       </div>
21007       <div class="tags">
21008
21009
21010         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>.
21011
21012
21013       </div>
21014     </div>
21015     <div class="padding"></div>
21016
21017     <div class="entry">
21018       <div class="title">
21019         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
21020       </div>
21021       <div class="date">
21022         22nd July 2009
21023       </div>
21024       <div class="body">
21025         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
21026 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
21027 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
21028 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
21029 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
21030 the package up to date.</p>
21031
21032 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
21033 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
21034 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
21035 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
21036 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
21037 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
21038 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
21039 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
21040 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
21041 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
21042 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
21043 working on the future release.</p>
21044
21045 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
21046 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
21047
21048       </div>
21049       <div class="tags">
21050
21051
21052         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>.
21053
21054
21055       </div>
21056     </div>
21057     <div class="padding"></div>
21058
21059     <div class="entry">
21060       <div class="title">
21061         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
21062       </div>
21063       <div class="date">
21064         24th June 2009
21065       </div>
21066       <div class="body">
21067         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
21068 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
21069 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
21070 funded
21071 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
21072 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
21073 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
21074 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
21075 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
21076 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
21077
21078 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
21079 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
21080 boot:</p>
21081
21082 <ul>
21083
21084 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
21085
21086 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
21087    clock is in UTC.</li>
21088
21089 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
21090    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
21091    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
21092
21093 </ul>
21094
21095 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
21096 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
21097 Villegas</a>.
21098
21099 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
21100 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
21101 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
21102 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
21103 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
21104 using this.</p>
21105
21106 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
21107 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
21108 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
21109 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
21110 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
21111 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
21112 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
21113
21114       </div>
21115       <div class="tags">
21116
21117
21118         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>.
21119
21120
21121       </div>
21122     </div>
21123     <div class="padding"></div>
21124
21125     <div class="entry">
21126       <div class="title">
21127         <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>
21128       </div>
21129       <div class="date">
21130          2nd May 2009
21131       </div>
21132       <div class="body">
21133         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
21134 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
21135 do not yet know them.</p>
21136
21137 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
21138 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
21139 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
21140 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
21141 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
21142 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
21143 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
21144 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
21145 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
21146 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
21147 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
21148
21149 <p>The second one is
21150 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
21151 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
21152 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
21153 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
21154 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
21155 and the company behind it is running
21156 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
21157 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
21158 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
21159 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
21160 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
21161 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
21162 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
21163 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
21164
21165 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
21166 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
21167 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
21168 surrounded by today.</p>
21169
21170       </div>
21171       <div class="tags">
21172
21173
21174         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>.
21175
21176
21177       </div>
21178     </div>
21179     <div class="padding"></div>
21180
21181     <div class="entry">
21182       <div class="title">
21183         <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>
21184       </div>
21185       <div class="date">
21186         28th April 2009
21187       </div>
21188       <div class="body">
21189         <p>Julien Blache
21190 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
21191 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
21192 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
21193 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
21194 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
21195 properties.</p>
21196
21197       </div>
21198       <div class="tags">
21199
21200
21201         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>.
21202
21203
21204       </div>
21205     </div>
21206     <div class="padding"></div>
21207
21208     <div class="entry">
21209       <div class="title">
21210         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
21211       </div>
21212       <div class="date">
21213          5th April 2009
21214       </div>
21215       <div class="body">
21216         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
21217 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
21218 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
21219 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
21220 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
21221 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
21222 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
21223 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
21224
21225 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
21226 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
21227 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
21228   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21229   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
21230
21231 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
21232 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
21233 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
21234 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
21235
21236 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
21237 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
21238 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
21239 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
21240
21241 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
21242 set -e
21243 URL="$1"
21244 SAVEFILE="$2"
21245 DURATION="$3"
21246 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
21247   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21248   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
21249 pid=$!
21250 sleep $DURATION
21251 kill $pid
21252 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
21253
21254       </div>
21255       <div class="tags">
21256
21257
21258         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>.
21259
21260
21261       </div>
21262     </div>
21263     <div class="padding"></div>
21264
21265     <div class="entry">
21266       <div class="title">
21267         <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>
21268       </div>
21269       <div class="date">
21270         30th March 2009
21271       </div>
21272       <div class="body">
21273         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
21274 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
21275 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
21276 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
21277 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
21278 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
21279 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
21280 application.</p>
21281
21282 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
21283 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
21284 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
21285 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
21286 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
21287 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
21288 blocked from doing so.</p>
21289
21290 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
21291 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
21292 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
21293 requirements change.</p>
21294
21295 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
21296 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
21297 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
21298
21299       </div>
21300       <div class="tags">
21301
21302
21303         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>.
21304
21305
21306       </div>
21307     </div>
21308     <div class="padding"></div>
21309
21310     <div class="entry">
21311       <div class="title">
21312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
21313       </div>
21314       <div class="date">
21315         29th March 2009
21316       </div>
21317       <div class="body">
21318         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
21319 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
21320 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
21321 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
21322 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
21323 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
21324 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
21325 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
21326 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
21327 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
21328 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
21329 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
21330 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
21331 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
21332 now. :)</p>
21333
21334       </div>
21335       <div class="tags">
21336
21337
21338         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>.
21339
21340
21341       </div>
21342     </div>
21343     <div class="padding"></div>
21344
21345     <div class="entry">
21346       <div class="title">
21347         <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>
21348       </div>
21349       <div class="date">
21350         29th March 2009
21351       </div>
21352       <div class="body">
21353         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
21354 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
21355 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
21356 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
21357 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
21358 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
21359
21360 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
21361 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
21362 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
21363 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
21364 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
21365 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
21366 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
21367 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
21368 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
21369 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
21370 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
21371 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
21372 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
21373
21374 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
21375 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
21376 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
21377 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
21378
21379 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
21380 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
21381
21382 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
21383 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
21384 new IETF work group?</p>
21385
21386       </div>
21387       <div class="tags">
21388
21389
21390         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>.
21391
21392
21393       </div>
21394     </div>
21395     <div class="padding"></div>
21396
21397     <div class="entry">
21398       <div class="title">
21399         <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>
21400       </div>
21401       <div class="date">
21402         28th February 2009
21403       </div>
21404       <div class="body">
21405         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
21406 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
21407 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
21408 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
21409 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
21410 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
21411 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
21412 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
21413 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
21414 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
21415 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
21416 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
21417 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
21418 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
21419 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
21420 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
21421 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
21422 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
21423 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
21424 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
21425 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
21426 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
21427 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
21428 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
21429 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
21430 machine.</p>
21431
21432 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
21433 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
21434 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
21435 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
21436 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
21437 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
21438 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
21439
21440 <pre>
21441 use LWP::Simple;
21442 use POSIX;
21443 use WWW::Mechanize;
21444 use Date::Parse;
21445 [...]
21446 sub get_support_info {
21447     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
21448     my $str;
21449
21450     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
21451         # fetch website from Dell support
21452         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";
21453         my $webpage = get($url);
21454         return undef unless ($webpage);
21455
21456         my $daysleft = -1;
21457         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
21458         foreach my $line (@lines) {
21459             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
21460             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
21461             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
21462
21463             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
21464             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
21465             my $lastend = "";
21466             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
21467                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
21468
21469                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21470                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
21471                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21472                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
21473                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
21474                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
21475                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
21476             }
21477             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
21478             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
21479                 if ($lastend lt $today);
21480         }
21481     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
21482         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
21483         my $url =
21484             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
21485         $mech->get($url);
21486         my $fields = {
21487             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
21488             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
21489             'country' => 'NO',
21490             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
21491             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
21492         };
21493         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
21494                             fields      => $fields );
21495         # Next step is screen scraping
21496         my $content = $mech->content();
21497
21498         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
21499         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
21500         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
21501         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
21502
21503         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
21504
21505         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
21506             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
21507                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
21508             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
21509             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21510                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
21511             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
21512                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
21513
21514             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
21515
21516             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
21517                 if ($end lt $today);
21518         }
21519     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
21520         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
21521         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
21522         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
21523             my $content =
21524                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
21525             if ($content) {
21526                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
21527                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
21528                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
21529                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
21530
21531                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
21532                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
21533
21534                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
21535
21536                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
21537                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
21538                     if ($end lt $today);
21539             }
21540         }
21541     }
21542     return $str;
21543 }
21544 </pre>
21545
21546 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
21547 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
21548 from dmidecode.</p>
21549
21550 <pre>
21551 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
21552                        "447707-B21");
21553 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
21554 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
21555                        "1234567");
21556 </pre>
21557
21558 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
21559 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
21560
21561 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
21562 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
21563 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
21564 do so.</p>
21565
21566       </div>
21567       <div class="tags">
21568
21569
21570         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>.
21571
21572
21573       </div>
21574     </div>
21575     <div class="padding"></div>
21576
21577     <div class="entry">
21578       <div class="title">
21579         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
21580       </div>
21581       <div class="date">
21582         20th February 2009
21583       </div>
21584       <div class="body">
21585         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
21586 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
21587 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
21588 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
21589 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
21590 the "missing" computer.</p>
21591
21592 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
21593 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
21594 code blocks as defined in the
21595 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
21596 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
21597 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
21598 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
21599 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
21600 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
21601 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
21602 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
21603 codes.</p>
21604
21605 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
21606 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
21607 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
21608 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
21609 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
21610 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
21611
21612 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
21613 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
21614 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
21615 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
21616 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
21617 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
21618 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
21619 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
21620 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
21621 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
21622
21623 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
21624 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
21625 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
21626
21627       </div>
21628       <div class="tags">
21629
21630
21631         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>.
21632
21633
21634       </div>
21635     </div>
21636     <div class="padding"></div>
21637
21638     <div class="entry">
21639       <div class="title">
21640         <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>
21641       </div>
21642       <div class="date">
21643         17th January 2009
21644       </div>
21645       <div class="body">
21646         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
21647 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
21648 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
21649 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
21650 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
21651 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
21652 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
21653 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
21654 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
21655 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
21656 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
21657 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
21658 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
21659 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
21660
21661 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
21662 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
21663 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
21664 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
21665 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
21666 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
21667 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
21668 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
21669 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
21670 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
21671 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
21672 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
21673 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
21674 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
21675 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
21676 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
21677 playing when the download is done.</p>
21678
21679 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
21680 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
21681 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
21682 too.</p>
21683
21684 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
21685 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
21686 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
21687 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
21688
21689       </div>
21690       <div class="tags">
21691
21692
21693         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>.
21694
21695
21696       </div>
21697     </div>
21698     <div class="padding"></div>
21699
21700     <div class="entry">
21701       <div class="title">
21702         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
21703       </div>
21704       <div class="date">
21705         28th December 2008
21706       </div>
21707       <div class="body">
21708         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
21709 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
21710 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
21711 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
21712 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
21713 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
21714 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
21715 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
21716 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
21717 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
21718 source, sink and mixer applications and
21719 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
21720 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
21721 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
21722 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
21723 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
21724 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
21725 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
21726 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
21727 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
21728
21729 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
21730 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
21731 larger stick as well.</p>
21732
21733       </div>
21734       <div class="tags">
21735
21736
21737         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>.
21738
21739
21740       </div>
21741     </div>
21742     <div class="padding"></div>
21743
21744     <div class="entry">
21745       <div class="title">
21746         <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>
21747       </div>
21748       <div class="date">
21749          7th December 2008
21750       </div>
21751       <div class="body">
21752         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
21753 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
21754 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
21755 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
21756 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
21757 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
21758 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
21759 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
21760
21761 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
21762 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
21763 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
21764 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
21765 of these cards.</p>
21766
21767       </div>
21768       <div class="tags">
21769
21770
21771         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>.
21772
21773
21774       </div>
21775     </div>
21776     <div class="padding"></div>
21777
21778     <div class="entry">
21779       <div class="title">
21780         <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>
21781       </div>
21782       <div class="date">
21783         25th November 2008
21784       </div>
21785       <div class="body">
21786         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
21787 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
21788 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
21789 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
21790 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
21791 notes are available on
21792 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
21793 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
21794 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
21795 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
21796 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
21797 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
21798 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
21799 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
21800 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
21801
21802 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
21803 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
21804
21805       </div>
21806       <div class="tags">
21807
21808
21809         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>.
21810
21811
21812       </div>
21813     </div>
21814     <div class="padding"></div>
21815
21816     <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>
21817     <div id="sidebar">
21818
21819
21820
21821 <h2>Archive</h2>
21822 <ul>
21823
21824 <li>2015
21825 <ul>
21826
21827 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
21828
21829 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (5)</a></li>
21830
21831 </ul></li>
21832
21833 <li>2014
21834 <ul>
21835
21836 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
21837
21838 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
21839
21840 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
21841
21842 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
21843
21844 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
21845
21846 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
21847
21848 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
21849
21850 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
21851
21852 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
21853
21854 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
21855
21856 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
21857
21858 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
21859
21860 </ul></li>
21861
21862 <li>2013
21863 <ul>
21864
21865 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
21866
21867 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
21868
21869 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
21870
21871 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
21872
21873 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
21874
21875 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
21876
21877 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
21878
21879 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
21880
21881 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
21882
21883 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
21884
21885 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
21886
21887 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
21888
21889 </ul></li>
21890
21891 <li>2012
21892 <ul>
21893
21894 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
21895
21896 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
21897
21898 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
21899
21900 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
21901
21902 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
21903
21904 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
21905
21906 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
21907
21908 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
21909
21910 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
21911
21912 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
21913
21914 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
21915
21916 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
21917
21918 </ul></li>
21919
21920 <li>2011
21921 <ul>
21922
21923 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
21924
21925 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
21926
21927 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
21928
21929 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
21930
21931 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
21932
21933 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
21934
21935 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
21936
21937 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
21938
21939 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
21940
21941 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
21942
21943 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
21944
21945 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
21946
21947 </ul></li>
21948
21949 <li>2010
21950 <ul>
21951
21952 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
21953
21954 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
21955
21956 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
21957
21958 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
21959
21960 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
21961
21962 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
21963
21964 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
21965
21966 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
21967
21968 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
21969
21970 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
21971
21972 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
21973
21974 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
21975
21976 </ul></li>
21977
21978 <li>2009
21979 <ul>
21980
21981 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
21982
21983 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
21984
21985 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
21986
21987 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
21988
21989 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
21990
21991 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
21992
21993 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
21994
21995 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
21996
21997 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
21998
21999 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
22000
22001 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22002
22003 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
22004
22005 </ul></li>
22006
22007 <li>2008
22008 <ul>
22009
22010 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
22011
22012 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
22013
22014 </ul></li>
22015
22016 </ul>
22017
22018
22019
22020 <h2>Tags</h2>
22021 <ul>
22022
22023  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
22024
22025  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
22026
22027  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
22028
22029  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
22030
22031  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (8)</a></li>
22032
22033  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
22034
22035  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
22036
22037  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
22038
22039  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (109)</a></li>
22040
22041  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (151)</a></li>
22042
22043  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
22044
22045  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
22046
22047  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (12)</a></li>
22048
22049  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
22050
22051  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (269)</a></li>
22052
22053  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (22)</a></li>
22054
22055  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
22056
22057  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (14)</a></li>
22058
22059  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
22060
22061  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (13)</a></li>
22062
22063  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (41)</a></li>
22064
22065  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (10)</a></li>
22066
22067  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
22068
22069  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
22070
22071  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
22072
22073  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
22074
22075  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
22076
22077  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
22078
22079  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (32)</a></li>
22080
22081  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (260)</a></li>
22082
22083  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (173)</a></li>
22084
22085  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (15)</a></li>
22086
22087  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
22088
22089  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (51)</a></li>
22090
22091  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (82)</a></li>
22092
22093  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
22094
22095  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
22096
22097  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
22098
22099  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
22100
22101  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
22102
22103  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
22104
22105  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
22106
22107  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
22108
22109  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (41)</a></li>
22110
22111  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
22112
22113  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
22114
22115  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (46)</a></li>
22116
22117  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
22118
22119  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
22120
22121  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (29)</a></li>
22122
22123  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
22124
22125  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
22126
22127  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
22128
22129  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (49)</a></li>
22130
22131  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
22132
22133  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (35)</a></li>
22134
22135 </ul>
22136
22137
22138     </div>
22139     <p style="text-align: right">
22140  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
22141 </p>
22142
22143   </body>
22144 </html>