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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "english".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         10th May 2015
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
  32 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
  33 criminal or not, are
  34 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
  35 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
  36 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
  37 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
  38 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
  39 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
  40 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
  41 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
  42 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
  43 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
  44 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
  45 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
  46 the police.</p>
  47
  48 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
  49 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
  50 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the finger
  51 print will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of the
  52 face and other information about the person.  Some of the information
  53 will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same system as
  54 currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will be
  55 available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
  56 the globe, but for those that do now know anyone in those circles it
  57 is good to know that
  58 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
  59 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
  60 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
  61 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
  62 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
  63 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
  64 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
  65 business getting access to that information.</p>
  66
  67 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
  68 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
  69 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
  70 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
  71 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
  72 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
  73 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
  74
  75 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
  76 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
  77 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
  78 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
  79
  80       </div>
  81       <div class="tags">
  82
  83
  84         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>.
  85
  86
  87       </div>
  88     </div>
  89     <div class="padding"></div>
  90
  91     <div class="entry">
  92       <div class="title">
  93         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
  94       </div>
  95       <div class="date">
  96          1st May 2015
  97       </div>
  98       <div class="body">
  99         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
 100 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
 101 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
 102 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
 103 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
 104 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
 105 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
 106
 107 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
 108 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
 109 the 2012 numbers are from
 110 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
 111 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
 112 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
 113 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
 114 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
 115
 116 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
 117 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
 118 enough.  See for example a
 119 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
 120 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
 121 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
 122 to get the storage requirements.</p>
 123
 124 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
 125 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
 126 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
 127 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
 128 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
 129
 130 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
 131 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
 132 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
 133 and large organisations:</p>
 134
 135 <table border="1">
 136 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
 137 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
 138 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
 139 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
 140 </table>
 141
 142 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
 143 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
 144 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
 145 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
 146 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
 147 collecting the data?</p>
 148
 149       </div>
 150       <div class="tags">
 151
 152
 153         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>.
 154
 155
 156       </div>
 157     </div>
 158     <div class="padding"></div>
 159
 160     <div class="entry">
 161       <div class="title">
 162         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
 163       </div>
 164       <div class="date">
 165         26th April 2015
 166       </div>
 167       <div class="body">
 168         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
 169 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
 170 announcement today</a>:</p>
 171
 172 <pre>
 173 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
 174 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
 175 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
 176 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
 177
 178 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
 179 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
 180 later today ;)
 181
 182 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
 183 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
 184 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
 185 be possible and encouraged!
 186
 187 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
 188 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
 189
 190 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
 191 operating system for schools, universities and other
 192 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
 193 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
 194 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
 195 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
 196 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
 197 days.
 198
 199 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
 200 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
 201 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
 202 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
 203
 204 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
 205 installation instructions are available, including detailed
 206 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
 207 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
 208 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
 209 least 5 characters!
 210
 211 == Where to download ==
 212
 213 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
 214 can be downloaded at the following locations:
 215
 216     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
 217     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
 218
 219 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
 220
 221 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
 222 available, with more software included (saving additional download
 223 time):
 224
 225     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
 226     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
 227
 228 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
 229
 230 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
 231 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
 232 options.
 233
 234 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
 235
 236 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
 237 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
 238
 239 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
 240 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
 241 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
 242 online version of the translated manual.
 243
 244 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
 245 release notes and the installation manual:
 246 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
 247 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
 248
 249
 250 == Errata / known problems ==
 251
 252     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
 253     DHCP (#780461).
 254
 255     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
 256
 257 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
 258 hostname immediately.
 259
 260 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
 261 more current and complete list.
 262
 263 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
 264
 265 === Software updates ===
 266
 267 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
 268
 269  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
 270    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
 271    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
 272
 273  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
 274    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
 275    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
 276    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
 277      the others see the manual.
 278  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
 279  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
 280  * GOsa 2.7.4
 281  * LTSP 5.5.4
 282  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 283  * new boot framework: systemd
 284  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
 285  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 286  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 287  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
 288  * golearn 0.9
 289  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 290  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 291  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
 292  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
 293    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
 294
 295 === Installation changes ===
 296
 297     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
 298     for the hardware present.
 299
 300 === Fixed bugs ===
 301
 302 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
 303 from a user perspective:
 304
 305  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
 306    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
 307    information is corrected (710362)
 308
 309  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
 310
 311 === Sugar desktop removed ===
 312
 313 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
 314 available in Debian Edu jessie.
 315
 316
 317 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
 318
 319 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
 320 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
 321 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
 322 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
 323 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
 324 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
 325 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
 326 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
 327 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
 328 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
 329 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
 330 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
 331 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
 332 environment.
 333
 334 == About Debian ==
 335
 336 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
 337 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
 338 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
 339 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
 340 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
 341 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
 342 operating system.
 343
 344 == Thanks ==
 345
 346 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
 347 You rock.
 348 </pre>
 349
 350       </div>
 351       <div class="tags">
 352
 353
 354         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>.
 355
 356
 357       </div>
 358     </div>
 359     <div class="padding"></div>
 360
 361     <div class="entry">
 362       <div class="title">
 363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
 364       </div>
 365       <div class="date">
 366         15th April 2015
 367       </div>
 368       <div class="body">
 369         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
 370 computer system for schools I've involved in,
 371 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
 372 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
 373 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
 374 Agarwal.</p>
 375
 376 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
 377
 378 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
 379 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
 380 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
 381 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
 382 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
 383 few software start-ups as well.</p>
 384
 385 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
 386 project?</strong></p>
 387
 388 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
 389 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
 390 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
 391 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
 392 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
 393 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
 394 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
 395
 396 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 397 Edu?</strong></p>
 398
 399 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
 400 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
 401 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
 402 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
 403 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
 404 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
 405 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
 406 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
 407
 408 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
 409 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
 410 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
 411 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
 412 for the developer per-se.</p>
 413
 414 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 415 Edu?</strong></p>
 416
 417 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
 418 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
 419 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
 420
 421 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
 422 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
 423 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
 424 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
 425 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
 426 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
 427 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
 428
 429 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
 430 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
 431 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
 432
 433 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
 434 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
 435 interactive manner. While sites such as the
 436 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
 437 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
 438 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
 439 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
 440 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
 441 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
 442 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
 443 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
 444 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
 445 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
 446 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
 447
 448 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
 449 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
 450 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
 451 also be used.</p>
 452
 453 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
 454 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
 455 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
 456 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
 457 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
 458 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
 459 the user's input.</p>
 460
 461 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
 462 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
 463 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
 464 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
 465 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
 466 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
 467 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
 468 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
 469
 470 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
 471 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
 472 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
 473 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
 474 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
 475 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
 476 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
 477 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
 478
 479 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 480
 481 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
 482 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
 483 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
 484 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
 485 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
 486
 487 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 488 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 489
 490 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
 491 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
 492 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
 493 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
 494 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
 495 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
 496
 497 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
 498 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
 499 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
 500 well.</p>
 501
 502 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
 503 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
 504 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
 505 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
 506
 507 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
 508 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
 509 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
 510 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
 511 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
 512 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
 513 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
 514 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
 515 releases.</p>
 516
 517 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
 518 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
 519 is aimed at.
 520
 521 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
 522 around 2 years, and
 523 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
 524 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
 525 there was :</p>
 526
 527 <ol>
 528
 529   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
 530    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
 531    portion/syllabus given.</li>
 532
 533   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
 534    is in the syllabus.</li>
 535
 536   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
 537    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
 538    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
 539    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
 540    as recognizable as say a
 541    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
 542    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
 543    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
 544    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
 545    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
 546    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
 547
 548 </ol>
 549
 550       </div>
 551       <div class="tags">
 552
 553
 554         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>.
 555
 556
 557       </div>
 558     </div>
 559     <div class="padding"></div>
 560
 561     <div class="entry">
 562       <div class="title">
 563         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
 564       </div>
 565       <div class="date">
 566          7th April 2015
 567       </div>
 568       <div class="body">
 569         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
 570 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
 571 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
 572
 573 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
 574 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
 575 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
 576 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
 577 part of my involvement with the
 578 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
 579 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
 580 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
 581 Hackathon with our friends
 582 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
 583 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
 584 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
 585 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
 586
 587 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
 588 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
 589
 590       </div>
 591       <div class="tags">
 592
 593
 594         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
 595
 596
 597       </div>
 598     </div>
 599     <div class="padding"></div>
 600
 601     <div class="entry">
 602       <div class="title">
 603         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
 604       </div>
 605       <div class="date">
 606          4th April 2015
 607       </div>
 608       <div class="body">
 609         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
 610 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
 611 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
 612 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
 613 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
 614 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
 615 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
 616 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
 617 project pages.  You can also check out the
 618 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
 619 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
 620 and HTML version available in the
 621 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
 622 directory</a>.</p>
 623
 624 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
 625 you find any.</p>
 626
 627       </div>
 628       <div class="tags">
 629
 630
 631         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>.
 632
 633
 634       </div>
 635     </div>
 636     <div class="padding"></div>
 637
 638     <div class="entry">
 639       <div class="title">
 640         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
 641       </div>
 642       <div class="date">
 643          9th March 2015
 644       </div>
 645       <div class="body">
 646         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
 647 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
 648 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
 649 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
 650 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
 651 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
 652 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
 653 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
 654 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
 655 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
 656 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
 657 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
 658 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
 659 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
 660
 661 <p>The list of NUUG videos
 662 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
 663 include things like a
 664 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
 665 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
 666 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
 667 re-implementation</a>, the
 668 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
 669 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
 670 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
 671 video</A> and many others.</p>
 672
 673 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
 674 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
 675 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
 676 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
 677 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
 678 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
 679 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
 680 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
 681 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
 682 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
 683
 684 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
 685 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
 686 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
 687 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
 688 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
 689 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
 690 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
 691 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
 692 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
 693 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
 694
 695       </div>
 696       <div class="tags">
 697
 698
 699         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>.
 700
 701
 702       </div>
 703     </div>
 704     <div class="padding"></div>
 705
 706     <div class="entry">
 707       <div class="title">
 708         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
 709       </div>
 710       <div class="date">
 711         28th February 2015
 712       </div>
 713       <div class="body">
 714         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
 715 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
 716 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
 717 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
 718 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
 719 made for
 720 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
 721 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
 722 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
 723 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
 724 a friend have
 725 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
 726 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
 727 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
 728 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
 729 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
 730 it happen ourselves.
 731 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
 732 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
 733 is.</p>
 734
 735 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
 736 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
 737
 738       </div>
 739       <div class="tags">
 740
 741
 742         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 743
 744
 745       </div>
 746     </div>
 747     <div class="padding"></div>
 748
 749     <div class="entry">
 750       <div class="title">
 751         <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>
 752       </div>
 753       <div class="date">
 754         25th February 2015
 755       </div>
 756       <div class="body">
 757         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
 758 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
 759 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
 760 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
 761 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
 762 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
 763 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
 764 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
 765 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
 766 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
 767 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
 768 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
 769 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
 770 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
 771 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
 772 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
 773 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
 774
 775 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
 776 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
 777 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
 778 with VLC.</p>
 779
 780 <ul>
 781   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
 782   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
 783 </ul>
 784
 785 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
 786 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
 787 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
 788 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
 789 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
 790 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
 791 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
 792
 793 <blockquote><pre>
 794 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
 795  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
 796  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
 797 </pre></blockquote>
 798
 799 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
 800 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
 801 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
 802 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
 803
 804       </div>
 805       <div class="tags">
 806
 807
 808         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>.
 809
 810
 811       </div>
 812     </div>
 813     <div class="padding"></div>
 814
 815     <div class="entry">
 816       <div class="title">
 817         <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>
 818       </div>
 819       <div class="date">
 820         10th February 2015
 821       </div>
 822       <div class="body">
 823         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
 824 that
 825 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
 826 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
 827 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
 828 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
 829 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
 830 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
 831 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
 832 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
 833 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
 834 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
 835 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
 836 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
 837 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
 838 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
 839 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
 840
 841 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
 842 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
 843 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
 844 controversy about these scanners.</p>
 845
 846 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
 847 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
 848 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
 849
 850       </div>
 851       <div class="tags">
 852
 853
 854         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>.
 855
 856
 857       </div>
 858     </div>
 859     <div class="padding"></div>
 860
 861     <div class="entry">
 862       <div class="title">
 863         <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>
 864       </div>
 865       <div class="date">
 866          8th February 2015
 867       </div>
 868       <div class="body">
 869         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
 870 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
 871 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
 872 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
 873 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
 874 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
 875 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
 876 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
 877 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
 878 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
 879 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
 880 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
 881
 882 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
 883 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
 884 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
 885 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
 886
 887 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
 888 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
 889 distribute the TV content.  The
 890 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
 891 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
 892 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
 893 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
 894 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
 895 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
 896 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
 897 following activity, we now have the schedule
 898 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
 899 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
 900 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
 901 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
 902
 903 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
 904 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
 905 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
 906 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
 907 streams are working as they should.</p>
 908
 909       </div>
 910       <div class="tags">
 911
 912
 913         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>.
 914
 915
 916       </div>
 917     </div>
 918     <div class="padding"></div>
 919
 920     <div class="entry">
 921       <div class="title">
 922         <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>
 923       </div>
 924       <div class="date">
 925         12th January 2015
 926       </div>
 927       <div class="body">
 928         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
 929 Foundation</a> announced a new video
 930 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
 931 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
 932 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
 933 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
 934 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
 935 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
 936
 937 <p>But today I was told that
 938 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
 939 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
 940 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
 941 available in
 942 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
 943 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
 944 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
 945
 946 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
 947 Libreplanet
 948 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
 949 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
 950
 951       </div>
 952       <div class="tags">
 953
 954
 955         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>.
 956
 957
 958       </div>
 959     </div>
 960     <div class="padding"></div>
 961
 962     <div class="entry">
 963       <div class="title">
 964         <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>
 965       </div>
 966       <div class="date">
 967         30th December 2014
 968       </div>
 969       <div class="body">
 970         <p>I am very happy that we in the
 971 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
 972 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
 973 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
 974 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
 975 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
 976 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
 977 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
 978 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
 979 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
 980 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
 981
 982 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
 983 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
 984 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
 985 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
 986 reports in public.</p>
 987
 988       </div>
 989       <div class="tags">
 990
 991
 992         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>.
 993
 994
 995       </div>
 996     </div>
 997     <div class="padding"></div>
 998
 999     <div class="entry">
1000       <div class="title">
1001         <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>
1002       </div>
1003       <div class="date">
1004         19th December 2014
1005       </div>
1006       <div class="body">
1007         <p>So, Sony caved in
1008 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
1009 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
1010 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
1011 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
1012 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
1013 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
1014 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
1015 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
1016 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
1017 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
1018 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
1019 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
1020 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
1021
1022 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
1023 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
1024 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
1025 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
1026
1027 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
1028 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
1029 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
1030 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
1031 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
1032 income. :)</p>
1033
1034       </div>
1035       <div class="tags">
1036
1037
1038         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>.
1039
1040
1041       </div>
1042     </div>
1043     <div class="padding"></div>
1044
1045     <div class="entry">
1046       <div class="title">
1047         <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>
1048       </div>
1049       <div class="date">
1050         22nd November 2014
1051       </div>
1052       <div class="body">
1053         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
1054 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
1055 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
1056 courtesy of
1057 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
1058 Schubert</a> and
1059 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
1060 McVittie</a>.
1061
1062 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
1063 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
1064 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
1065 you upgrade:</p>
1066
1067 <p><blockquote><pre>
1068 Package: systemd-sysv
1069 Pin: release o=Debian
1070 Pin-Priority: -1
1071 </pre></blockquote><p>
1072
1073 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
1074 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
1075 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
1076 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
1077 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
1078
1079 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
1080 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
1081 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
1082 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
1083 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
1084 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
1085
1086 <p><blockquote><pre>
1087 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
1088 </pre></blockquote><p>
1089
1090 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
1091
1092 <p><blockquote><pre>
1093 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
1094 </pre></blockquote><p>
1095
1096 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
1097 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
1098
1099 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
1100 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
1101 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
1102 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
1103 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
1104 Jessie is released.</p>
1105
1106 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
1107 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
1108 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
1109 line.</p>
1110
1111       </div>
1112       <div class="tags">
1113
1114
1115         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>.
1116
1117
1118       </div>
1119     </div>
1120     <div class="padding"></div>
1121
1122     <div class="entry">
1123       <div class="title">
1124         <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>
1125       </div>
1126       <div class="date">
1127         10th November 2014
1128       </div>
1129       <div class="body">
1130         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
1131 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
1132 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
1133
1134 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
1135 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
1136 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
1137 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
1138 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
1139 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
1140 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
1141 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
1142 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
1143 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
1144 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
1145 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
1146 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
1147 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
1148 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
1149
1150 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
1151 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
1152 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
1153 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
1154 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
1155 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
1156 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
1157 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
1158 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
1159 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
1160 were fairly easy, and
1161 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
1162 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
1163 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
1164 useful approach.</p>
1165
1166 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
1167 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
1168 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
1169 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
1170 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
1171 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
1172 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
1173 this:</p>
1174
1175 <p><blockquote><pre>
1176 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
1177   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
1178 </pre></blockquote></p>
1179
1180 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
1181 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
1182
1183 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
1184 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
1185 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
1186 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
1187 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
1188 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
1189 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
1190 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
1191 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
1192 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
1193 system.</p>
1194
1195 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
1196 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
1197 SMTorP. :)</p>
1198
1199       </div>
1200       <div class="tags">
1201
1202
1203         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>.
1204
1205
1206       </div>
1207     </div>
1208     <div class="padding"></div>
1209
1210     <div class="entry">
1211       <div class="title">
1212         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
1213       </div>
1214       <div class="date">
1215         27th October 2014
1216       </div>
1217       <div class="body">
1218         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
1219 sent out
1220 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
1221 announcement</a>:</p>
1222
1223 <pre>
1224 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
1225 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
1226
1227 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
1228 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
1229 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
1230 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
1231 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
1232 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
1233 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
1234
1235 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
1236 installation instructions are available, including detailed
1237 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
1238 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
1239 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
1240 of at least 5 characters!
1241
1242  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
1243
1244 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
1245 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
1246 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
1247 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
1248 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
1249
1250 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
1251 mostly in Germany and Norway.
1252
1253 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
1254 ===============================
1255
1256 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
1257 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
1258 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
1259 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
1260 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
1261 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
1262 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
1263 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
1264 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
1265 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
1266 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
1267 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
1268 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
1269 environment.
1270
1271  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
1272  [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;
1273
1274 Full release notes and manual
1275 =============================
1276
1277 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
1278 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
1279 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
1280 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
1281 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
1282
1283  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
1284  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
1285
1286 Where to get it
1287 ---------------
1288
1289 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
1290
1291  * <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>
1292  * <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>
1293  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
1294
1295 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
1296
1297 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
1298 ===============================================================================
1299
1300
1301 Installation changes
1302 --------------------
1303
1304  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
1305
1306 Software updates
1307 ----------------
1308
1309 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
1310
1311  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
1312  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
1313    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
1314    choose one of the others see manual.)
1315  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
1316  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
1317  * GOsa 2.7.4
1318  * LTSP 5.5.4
1319  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
1320  * new boot framework: systemd
1321  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
1322  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
1323  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
1324  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
1325  * golearn 0.9
1326  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
1327  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
1328  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
1329    installation.
1330  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
1331    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
1332
1333  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
1334  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
1335
1336 Fixed bugs
1337 ----------
1338
1339  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
1340    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
1341    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
1342  * and many others.
1343
1344 Documentation and translation updates
1345 -------------------------------------
1346
1347  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
1348    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
1349    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
1350
1351 Other changes
1352 -------------
1353
1354  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
1355    server takes more time.
1356  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
1357    doesn't work.
1358
1359 Regressions / known problems
1360 ----------------------------
1361
1362  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
1363    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
1364    and Debian bug #762103).
1365  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
1366    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
1367  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
1368    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
1369    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
1370
1371 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
1372
1373  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
1374
1375 How to report bugs
1376 ------------------
1377
1378 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
1379
1380 About Debian
1381 ============
1382
1383 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
1384 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
1385 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
1386 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
1387 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
1388 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
1389 operating system.
1390
1391 Contact Information
1392 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
1393 mail to press@debian.org.
1394
1395  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
1396 </pre>
1397
1398       </div>
1399       <div class="tags">
1400
1401
1402         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>.
1403
1404
1405       </div>
1406     </div>
1407     <div class="padding"></div>
1408
1409     <div class="entry">
1410       <div class="title">
1411         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
1412       </div>
1413       <div class="date">
1414         23rd October 2014
1415       </div>
1416       <div class="body">
1417         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
1418 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
1419 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
1420 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
1421 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
1422 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
1423 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
1424 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
1425 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
1426 live.</p>
1427
1428 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
1429 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
1430 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
1431 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
1432 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
1433 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
1434 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
1435 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
1436
1437       </div>
1438       <div class="tags">
1439
1440
1441         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>.
1442
1443
1444       </div>
1445     </div>
1446     <div class="padding"></div>
1447
1448     <div class="entry">
1449       <div class="title">
1450         <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>
1451       </div>
1452       <div class="date">
1453         22nd October 2014
1454       </div>
1455       <div class="body">
1456         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
1457 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
1458 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
1459 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
1460 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
1461 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
1462 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
1463 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
1464 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
1465 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
1466 lists I recently took over:</p>
1467
1468 <p><blockquote><pre>
1469 % time listadmin xiph
1470 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
1471 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
1472
1473 real    0m1.709s
1474 user    0m0.232s
1475 sys     0m0.012s
1476 %
1477 </pre></blockquote></p>
1478
1479 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
1480 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
1481 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
1482 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
1483 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
1484 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
1485 program.</p>
1486
1487 <p>If you install
1488 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
1489 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
1490 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
1491
1492 <p><blockquote><pre>
1493 username username@example.org
1494 spamlevel 23
1495 default discard
1496 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
1497
1498 password secret
1499 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
1500 mailman-list@lists.example.com
1501
1502 password hidden
1503 other-list@otherserver.example.org
1504 </pre></blockquote></p>
1505
1506 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
1507 learn the details.</p>
1508
1509 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
1510 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
1511 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
1512 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
1513
1514 <p><blockquote><pre>
1515 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
1516 </pre></blockquote></p>
1517
1518 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
1519 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
1520 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
1521 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
1522 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
1523 email.</p>
1524
1525 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
1526 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
1527 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
1528 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
1529 software.</p>
1530
1531 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1532 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1533 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1534
1535 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
1536 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
1537 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
1538 sure why.</p>
1539
1540       </div>
1541       <div class="tags">
1542
1543
1544         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>.
1545
1546
1547       </div>
1548     </div>
1549     <div class="padding"></div>
1550
1551     <div class="entry">
1552       <div class="title">
1553         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
1554       </div>
1555       <div class="date">
1556         17th October 2014
1557       </div>
1558       <div class="body">
1559         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
1560 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
1561 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
1562 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
1563 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
1564 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
1565 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
1566
1567 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
1568 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
1569 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
1570 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
1571 of this story.)</p>
1572
1573 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
1574 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
1575 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
1576 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
1577 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
1578 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
1579 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
1580 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
1581 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
1582 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
1583
1584 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
1585 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
1586 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
1587 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
1588
1589 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
1590 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
1591
1592 <p><blockquote><pre>
1593 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
1594 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
1595 </pre></blockquote></p>
1596
1597 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
1598 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
1599 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
1600 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
1601 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
1602 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
1603 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
1604 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
1605
1606 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
1607 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
1608
1609 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
1610 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
1611 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
1612 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
1613 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
1614
1615 <p><blockquote><pre>
1616 Task: isenkram-packages
1617 Section: hardware
1618 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1619  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
1620  proposed.
1621 Test-new-install: show show
1622 Relevance: 8
1623 Packages: for-current-hardware
1624
1625 Task: isenkram-firmware
1626 Section: hardware
1627 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1628  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
1629  packages are proposed.
1630 Test-new-install: mark show
1631 Relevance: 8
1632 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
1633 </pre></blockquote></p>
1634
1635 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
1636 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
1637 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
1638 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
1639 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
1640
1641 <p><blockquote><pre>
1642 #!/bin/sh
1643 #
1644 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
1645 export PATH
1646 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1647 </pre></blockquote></p>
1648
1649 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
1650 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
1651
1652 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
1653 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
1654 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
1655 install.</p>
1656
1657 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
1658 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
1659 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
1660
1661       </div>
1662       <div class="tags">
1663
1664
1665         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>.
1666
1667
1668       </div>
1669     </div>
1670     <div class="padding"></div>
1671
1672     <div class="entry">
1673       <div class="title">
1674         <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>
1675       </div>
1676       <div class="date">
1677          4th October 2014
1678       </div>
1679       <div class="body">
1680         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
1681 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
1682 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
1683 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
1684
1685 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
1686
1687 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
1688 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
1689 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
1690
1691       </div>
1692       <div class="tags">
1693
1694
1695         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>.
1696
1697
1698       </div>
1699     </div>
1700     <div class="padding"></div>
1701
1702     <div class="entry">
1703       <div class="title">
1704         <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>
1705       </div>
1706       <div class="date">
1707          4th October 2014
1708       </div>
1709       <div class="body">
1710         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
1711 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
1712 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
1713 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
1714 Dibb.</p>
1715
1716 <p>I just wrapped up
1717 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
1718 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
1719 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
1720 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
1721 0.17.</p>
1722
1723 <ul>
1724
1725  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
1726  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
1727    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
1728  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
1729  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
1730  <li>Fix include orders</li>
1731  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
1732  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
1733  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
1734    the palette size is the same.</li>
1735  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
1736  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
1737  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
1738  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
1739    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
1740
1741 </ul>
1742
1743 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
1744 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
1745 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
1746
1747       </div>
1748       <div class="tags">
1749
1750
1751         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>.
1752
1753
1754       </div>
1755     </div>
1756     <div class="padding"></div>
1757
1758     <div class="entry">
1759       <div class="title">
1760         <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>
1761       </div>
1762       <div class="date">
1763         26th September 2014
1764       </div>
1765       <div class="body">
1766         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1767 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
1768 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
1769 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
1770 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
1771 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
1772 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
1773 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
1774 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
1775 future.  The
1776 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
1777 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
1778 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
1779 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
1780 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
1781
1782 <p>First, download the test ISO via
1783 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
1784 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
1785 or rsync (use
1786 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
1787 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
1788 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
1789 install with some tweaking.</p>
1790
1791 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
1792 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
1793
1794 <p><blockquote><pre>
1795 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
1796 </pre></blockquote></p>
1797
1798 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
1799 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
1800 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
1801 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
1802
1803 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
1804 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
1805 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
1806 your need.</p>
1807
1808 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
1809 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
1810 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
1811 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
1812 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
1813 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
1814 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
1815 days.</p>
1816
1817 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
1818 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
1819 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
1820 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
1821 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
1822 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
1823 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
1824 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
1825 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
1826
1827 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
1828 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
1829 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
1830
1831       </div>
1832       <div class="tags">
1833
1834
1835         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>.
1836
1837
1838       </div>
1839     </div>
1840     <div class="padding"></div>
1841
1842     <div class="entry">
1843       <div class="title">
1844         <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>
1845       </div>
1846       <div class="date">
1847         25th September 2014
1848       </div>
1849       <div class="body">
1850         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
1851 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
1852 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
1853 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
1854 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
1855 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
1856 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
1857 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
1858 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
1859 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
1860 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
1861 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
1862 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
1863
1864 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
1865 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
1866 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
1867 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
1868 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
1869 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
1870 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
1871 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
1872 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
1873 list</a>. :)</p>
1874
1875       </div>
1876       <div class="tags">
1877
1878
1879         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>.
1880
1881
1882       </div>
1883     </div>
1884     <div class="padding"></div>
1885
1886     <div class="entry">
1887       <div class="title">
1888         <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>
1889       </div>
1890       <div class="date">
1891         16th September 2014
1892       </div>
1893       <div class="body">
1894         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
1895 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
1896 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
1897 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
1898 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
1899 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
1900 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
1901 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
1902 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
1903 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
1904 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
1905 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
1906 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
1907 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
1908
1909 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
1910 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
1911 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
1912 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
1913 depend on the small and clever package
1914 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
1915 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
1916 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
1917 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
1918 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
1919 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
1920 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
1921 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
1922 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
1923 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
1924 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
1925
1926 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
1927 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
1928 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
1929 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
1930 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
1931 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
1932 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
1933 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
1934 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
1935 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
1936 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
1937 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
1938 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
1939 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
1940 dialog.</p>
1941
1942 <p><table>
1943
1944 <tr>
1945 <th>Machine/setup</th>
1946 <th>Original tasksel</th>
1947 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
1948 <th>Reduction</th>
1949 </tr>
1950
1951 <tr>
1952 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
1953 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
1954 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
1955 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
1956 </tr>
1957
1958 <tr>
1959 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
1960 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
1961 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
1962 <td>23 min 40%</td>
1963 </tr>
1964
1965 <tr>
1966 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
1967 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
1968 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
1969 <td>11 min 50%</td>
1970 </tr>
1971
1972 <tr>
1973 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
1974 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
1975 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
1976 <td>2 min 33%</td>
1977 </tr>
1978
1979 <tr>
1980 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
1981 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
1982 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
1983 <td>4 min 21%</td>
1984 </tr>
1985
1986 </table></p>
1987
1988 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
1989 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
1990 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
1991 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
1992 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
1993 installed.</p>
1994
1995 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
1996 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
1997 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
1998 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
1999 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
2000 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
2001 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
2002 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
2003 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
2004 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
2005 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
2006 for the entire installation.</p>
2007
2008 <p>I've implemented this in the
2009 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
2010 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
2011 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
2012 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
2013 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
2014
2015 <p><blockquote><pre>
2016 #!/bin/sh
2017 set -e
2018 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
2019 info() {
2020     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
2021 }
2022 error() {
2023     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
2024 }
2025 override_install() {
2026     apt-install eatmydata || true
2027     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
2028         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
2029             file=/usr/bin/$bin
2030             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
2031             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
2032                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
2033                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
2034                     > /target$file.edu
2035                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
2036                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
2037                     --rename --quiet --add $file
2038                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
2039             else
2040                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
2041             fi
2042         done
2043     else
2044         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
2045     fi
2046 }
2047
2048 override_install
2049 </pre></blockquote></p>
2050
2051 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
2052 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
2053
2054 <p><blockquote><pre>
2055 #! /bin/sh -e
2056 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
2057 error() {
2058     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
2059 }
2060 remove_install_override() {
2061     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
2062         file=/usr/bin/$bin
2063         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
2064             rm /target$file
2065             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
2066                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
2067             rm /target$file.edu
2068         else
2069             error "Missing divert for $file."
2070         fi
2071     done
2072     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
2073 }
2074
2075 remove_install_override
2076 </pre></blockquote></p>
2077
2078 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
2079 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
2080 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
2081
2082 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
2083 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
2084 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
2085 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
2086 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
2087 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
2088 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
2089 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
2090 everyone.</p>
2091
2092 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
2093 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
2094 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
2095 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
2096
2097 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
2098 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
2099 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
2100 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
2101 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
2102
2103 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
2104 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
2105 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
2106 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
2107 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
2108
2109       </div>
2110       <div class="tags">
2111
2112
2113         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>.
2114
2115
2116       </div>
2117     </div>
2118     <div class="padding"></div>
2119
2120     <div class="entry">
2121       <div class="title">
2122         <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>
2123       </div>
2124       <div class="date">
2125         10th September 2014
2126       </div>
2127       <div class="body">
2128         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
2129 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
2130 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
2131 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
2132 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
2133 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
2134 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
2135 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
2136 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
2137 those problems are gone now.</p>
2138
2139 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
2140 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
2141 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
2142 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
2143 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
2144
2145 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
2146 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
2147 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
2148
2149 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
2150 line:</p>
2151
2152 <p><blockquote><pre>
2153 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
2154 </pre></blockquote></p>
2155
2156 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
2157 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
2158 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
2159 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
2160
2161 <p><blockquote><pre>
2162 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
2163 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
2164 %
2165 </pre></blockquote></p>
2166
2167 <p>Now if only
2168 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
2169 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
2170 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
2171 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
2172 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
2173 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
2174 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
2175 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
2176 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
2177
2178       </div>
2179       <div class="tags">
2180
2181
2182         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>.
2183
2184
2185       </div>
2186     </div>
2187     <div class="padding"></div>
2188
2189     <div class="entry">
2190       <div class="title">
2191         <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>
2192       </div>
2193       <div class="date">
2194         25th August 2014
2195       </div>
2196       <div class="body">
2197         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
2198 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
2199 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
2200 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
2201 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
2202 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
2203 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
2204 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
2205 am not sure.
2206 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
2207 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
2208 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
2209 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
2210 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
2211 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
2212 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
2213 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
2214 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
2215 licenses are.</p>
2216
2217 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
2218 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
2219 end user</a>
2220 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
2221 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
2222
2223 <p><blockquote>
2224 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
2225 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
2226
2227 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
2228 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
2229 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
2230 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
2231 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
2232 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
2233 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
2234 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
2235 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
2236 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
2237 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
2238 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
2239 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
2240 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
2241 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
2242 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
2243 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
2244 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
2245
2246 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
2247 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
2248
2249 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
2250 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
2251 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
2252 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
2253 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
2254 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
2255 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
2256 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
2257 </blockquote></p>
2258
2259 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
2260 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
2261
2262 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
2263 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
2264
2265 <p><blockquote>
2266
2267 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
2268 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
2269 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
2270 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
2271 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
2272 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
2273 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
2274 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
2275 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
2276 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
2277 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
2278 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
2279
2280 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
2281 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
2282 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
2283 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
2284 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
2285 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
2286 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
2287 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
2288 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
2289 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
2290 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
2291 additional details.</p>
2292
2293 </blockquote></p>
2294
2295 <p>Some free software like
2296 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
2297 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
2298 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
2299 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
2300
2301       </div>
2302       <div class="tags">
2303
2304
2305         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>.
2306
2307
2308       </div>
2309     </div>
2310     <div class="padding"></div>
2311
2312     <div class="entry">
2313       <div class="title">
2314         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
2315       </div>
2316       <div class="date">
2317         31st July 2014
2318       </div>
2319       <div class="body">
2320         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
2321 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
2322 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
2323 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
2324 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
2325 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
2326
2327 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2328
2329 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
2330 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
2331 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
2332 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
2333 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
2334 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
2335 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
2336 works with Windows . :-(</p>
2337
2338 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
2339 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
2340 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
2341 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
2342 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
2343 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
2344
2345 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2346 project?</strong></p>
2347
2348 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
2349 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
2350 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
2351 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
2352 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
2353 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
2354 with this job.</p>
2355
2356 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2357 Edu?</strong></p>
2358
2359 <p>The independence.</p>
2360
2361 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
2362 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
2363 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
2364
2365 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
2366 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
2367 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
2368 working reliable. </p>
2369
2370 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
2371 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
2372 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
2373 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
2374 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
2375 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
2376 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
2377 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
2378
2379 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2380 Edu?</strong></p>
2381
2382 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
2383 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
2384 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
2385
2386 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2387
2388 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
2389 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
2390
2391 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2392 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2393
2394 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
2395 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
2396 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
2397 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
2398 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
2399 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
2400 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
2401
2402       </div>
2403       <div class="tags">
2404
2405
2406         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>.
2407
2408
2409       </div>
2410     </div>
2411     <div class="padding"></div>
2412
2413     <div class="entry">
2414       <div class="title">
2415         <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>
2416       </div>
2417       <div class="date">
2418         23rd July 2014
2419       </div>
2420       <div class="body">
2421         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
2422 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
2423 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
2424 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
2425 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
2426 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
2427 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
2428 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
2429 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
2430 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
2431 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
2432 the translation show this very well:</p>
2433
2434 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
2435
2436 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
2437 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
2438 project pages and the
2439 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
2440 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
2441 and HTML version available in the
2442 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
2443 directory</a>.</p>
2444
2445 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
2446 you find any.</p>
2447
2448       </div>
2449       <div class="tags">
2450
2451
2452         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>.
2453
2454
2455       </div>
2456     </div>
2457     <div class="padding"></div>
2458
2459     <div class="entry">
2460       <div class="title">
2461         <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>
2462       </div>
2463       <div class="date">
2464         17th June 2014
2465       </div>
2466       <div class="body">
2467         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2468 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
2469 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
2470 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
2471 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
2472
2473 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
2474 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
2475 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
2476 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
2477 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
2478 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
2479 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
2480 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
2481 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
2482 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
2483 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
2484 goals.</p>
2485
2486 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
2487 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
2488 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
2489 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
2490 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
2491 chapters together into one large web page (aka
2492 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
2493 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
2494 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
2495 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
2496 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
2497 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
2498 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
2499 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
2500 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
2501 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
2502 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
2503 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
2504 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
2505 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
2506 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
2507 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
2508 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
2509 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
2510
2511 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
2512 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
2513 track the English original.  For this we use the
2514 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
2515 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
2516 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
2517 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
2518 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
2519 files), which the translations update with the native language
2520 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
2521 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
2522 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
2523 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
2524 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
2525 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
2526 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
2527 of the documentation.</p>
2528
2529 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
2530 recommend using
2531 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
2532 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
2533 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
2534 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
2535 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
2536 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
2537 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
2538 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
2539
2540 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
2541 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
2542 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
2543 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
2544 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
2545 translated images by storing translated versions in
2546 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
2547 package maintainers know more.</p>
2548
2549 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
2550 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
2551 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
2552 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
2553 PDF version</a> or the
2554 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
2555 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
2556 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
2557
2558 <p>To learn more, check out
2559 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
2560 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
2561 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
2562 manual on the wiki</a> and
2563 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
2564 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
2565
2566       </div>
2567       <div class="tags">
2568
2569
2570         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>.
2571
2572
2573       </div>
2574     </div>
2575     <div class="padding"></div>
2576
2577     <div class="entry">
2578       <div class="title">
2579         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
2580       </div>
2581       <div class="date">
2582         29th May 2014
2583       </div>
2584       <div class="body">
2585         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
2586 in my car, connected to
2587 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
2588 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
2589 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
2590 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
2591 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
2592 such car computer.</p>
2593
2594 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
2595
2596 <ul>
2597
2598  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
2599
2600  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
2601    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
2602    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
2603    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
2604    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
2605
2606  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
2607    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
2608    route.</li>
2609
2610  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
2611
2612  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
2613    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
2614    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
2615    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
2616    connection do not work.</li>
2617
2618  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
2619    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
2620
2621  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
2622    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
2623
2624  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
2625    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
2626
2627 </ul>
2628
2629 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
2630 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
2631
2632       </div>
2633       <div class="tags">
2634
2635
2636         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2637
2638
2639       </div>
2640     </div>
2641     <div class="padding"></div>
2642
2643     <div class="entry">
2644       <div class="title">
2645         <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>
2646       </div>
2647       <div class="date">
2648         29th April 2014
2649       </div>
2650       <div class="body">
2651         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
2652 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
2653 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
2654 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
2655 newer AVM2 format - see
2656 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
2657 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
2658 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
2659 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
2660 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
2661 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
2662 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
2663 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
2664 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
2665 sites do not work yet.</p>
2666
2667 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
2668 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
2669 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
2670 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
2671 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
2672 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
2673 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
2674 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
2675 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
2676 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
2677 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
2678
2679 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
2680 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
2681 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
2682 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
2683 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
2684 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
2685 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
2686
2687 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
2688 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
2689 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
2690 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
2691 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
2692
2693       </div>
2694       <div class="tags">
2695
2696
2697         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>.
2698
2699
2700       </div>
2701     </div>
2702     <div class="padding"></div>
2703
2704     <div class="entry">
2705       <div class="title">
2706         <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>
2707       </div>
2708       <div class="date">
2709         23rd April 2014
2710       </div>
2711       <div class="body">
2712         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
2713 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
2714 So I implemented one, using
2715 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
2716 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
2717 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
2718 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
2719 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
2720 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
2721
2722 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
2723 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
2724 packages to install.  The first part is in
2725 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
2726 this:</p>
2727
2728 <p><blockquote><pre>
2729 Task: isenkram
2730 Section: hardware
2731 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
2732  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
2733  proposed.
2734 Test-new-install: mark show
2735 Relevance: 8
2736 Packages: for-current-hardware
2737 </pre></blockquote></p>
2738
2739 <p>The second part is in
2740 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
2741 this:</p>
2742
2743 <p><blockquote><pre>
2744 #!/bin/sh
2745 #
2746 (
2747     isenkram-lookup
2748     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2749 ) | sort -u
2750 </pre></blockquote></p>
2751
2752 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
2753 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
2754 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
2755 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
2756 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
2757 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
2758
2759 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
2760 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
2761 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
2762 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
2763 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
2764 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
2765 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
2766 the python-apt code (bug
2767 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
2768 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
2769 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
2770 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
2771 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
2772 unstable today.</p>
2773
2774 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
2775 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
2776 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
2777 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
2778 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
2779 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
2780 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
2781 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
2782 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
2783
2784 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
2785 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
2786 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
2787 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
2788 package.  See also
2789 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
2790 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
2791 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
2792 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
2793
2794       </div>
2795       <div class="tags">
2796
2797
2798         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>.
2799
2800
2801       </div>
2802     </div>
2803     <div class="padding"></div>
2804
2805     <div class="entry">
2806       <div class="title">
2807         <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>
2808       </div>
2809       <div class="date">
2810         15th April 2014
2811       </div>
2812       <div class="body">
2813         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
2814 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
2815 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
2816 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
2817 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
2818 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
2819
2820 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
2821 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
2822 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
2823 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
2824 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
2825 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
2826 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
2827
2828 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
2829 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
2830 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
2831 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
2832 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
2833 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
2834 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
2835 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
2836 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
2837 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
2838 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
2839 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
2840
2841 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
2842 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
2843 become root:</p>
2844
2845 <p><pre>
2846 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
2847   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
2848   u-boot-tools
2849 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
2850   freedom-maker
2851 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
2852 </pre></p>
2853
2854 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
2855 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
2856 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
2857 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
2858 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
2859 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
2860 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
2861 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
2862
2863 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
2864 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
2865 the preseed values:</p>
2866
2867 <p><pre>
2868 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
2869 </pre></p>
2870
2871 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
2872 it still work.</p>
2873
2874 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
2875 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
2876 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
2877 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
2878 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
2879 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
2880 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
2881
2882 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
2883 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
2884 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
2885 irc.debian.org)</a> and
2886 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2887 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2888
2889       </div>
2890       <div class="tags">
2891
2892
2893         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>.
2894
2895
2896       </div>
2897     </div>
2898     <div class="padding"></div>
2899
2900     <div class="entry">
2901       <div class="title">
2902         <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>
2903       </div>
2904       <div class="date">
2905          9th April 2014
2906       </div>
2907       <div class="body">
2908         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
2909 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
2910 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
2911 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
2912 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
2913 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
2914 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
2915 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
2916 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
2917 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
2918 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
2919 have looked at a system called
2920 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
2921 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
2922
2923 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
2924 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
2925 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
2926 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
2927 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
2928 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
2929 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
2930 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
2931 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
2932 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
2933 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
2934 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
2935 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
2936
2937 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
2938 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
2939 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
2940 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
2941 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
2942 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
2943 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
2944 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
2945 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
2946 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
2947 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
2948 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
2949 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
2950 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
2951 account.</p>
2952
2953 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
2954 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
2955 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
2956 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
2957 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
2958 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
2959 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
2960
2961 <p><blockquote><pre>
2962 [s3c]
2963 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2964 backend-login: API-login
2965 backend-password: API-password
2966 fs-passphrase: local-password
2967 </pre></blockquote></p>
2968
2969 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
2970 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
2971 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
2972 details and password to create it:</p>
2973
2974 <p><blockquote><pre>
2975 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
2976 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2977   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2978 Enter backend login:
2979 Enter backend password:
2980 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
2981 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
2982 Enter encryption password:
2983 Confirm encryption password:
2984 Generating random encryption key...
2985 Creating metadata tables...
2986 Dumping metadata...
2987 ..objects..
2988 ..blocks..
2989 ..inodes..
2990 ..inode_blocks..
2991 ..symlink_targets..
2992 ..names..
2993 ..contents..
2994 ..ext_attributes..
2995 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2996 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
2997 # </pre></blockquote></p>
2998
2999 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
3000
3001 <p><blockquote><pre>
3002 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
3003   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
3004 Using 4 upload threads.
3005 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
3006 Reading metadata...
3007 ..objects..
3008 ..blocks..
3009 ..inodes..
3010 ..inode_blocks..
3011 ..symlink_targets..
3012 ..names..
3013 ..contents..
3014 ..ext_attributes..
3015 Mounting filesystem...
3016 # df -h /s3ql
3017 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
3018 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
3019 #
3020 </pre></blockquote></p>
3021
3022 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
3023 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
3024 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
3025 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
3026 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
3027 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
3028
3029 <p><blockquote><pre>
3030 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
3031 #
3032 </pre></blockquote></p>
3033
3034 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
3035 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
3036 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
3037 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
3038 file system:</p>
3039
3040 <p><blockquote><pre>
3041 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
3042 Using cached metadata.
3043 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
3044 Checking DB integrity...
3045 Creating temporary extra indices...
3046 Checking lost+found...
3047 Checking cached objects...
3048 Checking names (refcounts)...
3049 Checking contents (names)...
3050 Checking contents (inodes)...
3051 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
3052 Checking objects (reference counts)...
3053 Checking objects (backend)...
3054 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
3055 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
3056 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
3057 Checking objects (sizes)...
3058 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
3059 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
3060 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
3061 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
3062 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
3063 Checking inodes (sizes)...
3064 Checking extended attributes (names)...
3065 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
3066 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
3067 Checking directory reachability...
3068 Checking unix conventions...
3069 Checking referential integrity...
3070 Dropping temporary indices...
3071 Backing up old metadata...
3072 Dumping metadata...
3073 ..objects..
3074 ..blocks..
3075 ..inodes..
3076 ..inode_blocks..
3077 ..symlink_targets..
3078 ..names..
3079 ..contents..
3080 ..ext_attributes..
3081 Compressing and uploading metadata...
3082 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
3083 #
3084 </pre></blockquote></p>
3085
3086 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
3087 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
3088 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
3089 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
3090 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
3091 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
3092 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
3093 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
3094 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
3095 working set.</p>
3096
3097 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
3098 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
3099 busy:</p>
3100
3101 <p><blockquote><pre>
3102 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
3103   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
3104 Using 8 upload threads.
3105 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
3106 #
3107 </pre></blockquote></p>
3108
3109 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
3110 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
3111 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
3112 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
3113 s3qlctrl:
3114
3115 <p><blockquote><pre>
3116 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
3117 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
3118 #
3119 </pre></blockquote></p>
3120
3121 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
3122 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
3123 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
3124 a report:</p>
3125
3126 <p><blockquote><pre>
3127 # s3qlstat /s3ql
3128 Directory entries:    9141
3129 Inodes:               9143
3130 Data blocks:          8851
3131 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
3132 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
3133 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
3134 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
3135 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
3136 #
3137 </pre></blockquote></p>
3138
3139 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
3140 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
3141 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
3142 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
3143 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
3144 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
3145 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
3146 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
3147 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
3148 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
3149 best.</p>
3150
3151 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
3152 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
3153 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
3154 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
3155 poster is titled
3156 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
3157 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
3158 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
3159 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
3160 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
3161
3162 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
3163 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
3164 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
3165 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
3166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
3167 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
3168 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
3169 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
3170
3171 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
3172 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
3173 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
3174 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
3175 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
3176 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
3177 only read from it.</p>
3178
3179 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3180 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3181 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3182
3183       </div>
3184       <div class="tags">
3185
3186
3187         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>.
3188
3189
3190       </div>
3191     </div>
3192     <div class="padding"></div>
3193
3194     <div class="entry">
3195       <div class="title">
3196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
3197       </div>
3198       <div class="date">
3199          1st April 2014
3200       </div>
3201       <div class="body">
3202         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
3203 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
3204 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
3205 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
3206 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
3207 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
3208 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
3209 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
3210 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
3211 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
3212 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
3213 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
3214 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
3215
3216 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
3217 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
3218 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
3219 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
3220 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
3221 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
3222 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
3223 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
3224 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
3225 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
3226 Linux.</p>
3227
3228 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
3229 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
3230 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
3231 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
3232 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
3233 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
3234 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
3235 Windows before metro).</p>
3236
3237 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
3238 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
3239 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
3240 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
3241 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
3242 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
3243 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
3244 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
3245 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
3246 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
3247 old Windows binaries, check it out by
3248 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
3249 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
3250 image.</p>
3251
3252       </div>
3253       <div class="tags">
3254
3255
3256         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>.
3257
3258
3259       </div>
3260     </div>
3261     <div class="padding"></div>
3262
3263     <div class="entry">
3264       <div class="title">
3265         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
3266       </div>
3267       <div class="date">
3268         30th March 2014
3269       </div>
3270       <div class="body">
3271         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
3272 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
3273 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
3274 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
3275 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
3276
3277 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3278
3279 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
3280 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
3281 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
3282 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
3283 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
3284
3285 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
3286 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
3287 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
3288
3289 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
3290 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
3291 hunger.</p>
3292
3293 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3294 project?</strong></p>
3295
3296 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
3297 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
3298 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
3299 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
3300 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
3301 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
3302 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
3303 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
3304 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
3305 running.  I just loved it.</p>
3306
3307 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3308 Edu?</strong></p>
3309
3310 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
3311 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
3312 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
3313 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
3314 be made of steel.</p>
3315
3316 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3317 Edu?</strong></p>
3318
3319 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
3320
3321 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
3322 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
3323 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
3324 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
3325 or dropped.</p>
3326
3327 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
3328 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
3329 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
3330 discourage many people too.</p>
3331
3332 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3333
3334 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
3335 Virtualbox.</p>
3336
3337
3338 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3339 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3340
3341 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
3342 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
3343 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
3344 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
3345 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
3346 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
3347 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
3348 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
3349 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
3350
3351       </div>
3352       <div class="tags">
3353
3354
3355         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>.
3356
3357
3358       </div>
3359     </div>
3360     <div class="padding"></div>
3361
3362     <div class="entry">
3363       <div class="title">
3364         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
3365       </div>
3366       <div class="date">
3367         25th March 2014
3368       </div>
3369       <div class="body">
3370         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
3371 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
3372 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
3373 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
3374 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
3375 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
3376 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
3377 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
3378 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
3379
3380 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
3381 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
3382 looked a given way.  Such
3383 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
3384 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
3385 called a
3386 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
3387 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
3388 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
3389 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
3390 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
3391 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
3392 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
3393 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
3394 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
3395 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
3396 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
3397 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
3398 There are several commercial services around providing such
3399 timestamping.  A quick search for
3400 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
3401 service</a>" pointed me to at least
3402 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
3403 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
3404 Vadis</a>,
3405 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
3406 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
3407 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
3408 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
3409
3410 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
3411 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
3412 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
3413 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
3414 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
3415 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
3416 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
3417 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
3418 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
3419 Greifswald.</p>
3420
3421 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
3422 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
3423 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
3424 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
3425 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
3426
3427 <p><blockquote><pre>
3428 #!/bin/sh
3429 set -e
3430 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
3431 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
3432 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
3433 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
3434 cafile=chain.txt
3435 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
3436     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
3437 fi
3438 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
3439     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
3440 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
3441 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
3442 base64 < "$resfile"
3443 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
3444 </pre></blockquote></p>
3445
3446 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
3447 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
3448 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
3449 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
3450 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
3451 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
3452 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
3453 changed.</p>
3454
3455 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
3456 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
3457 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
3458 to set up?</p>
3459
3460       </div>
3461       <div class="tags">
3462
3463
3464         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>.
3465
3466
3467       </div>
3468     </div>
3469     <div class="padding"></div>
3470
3471     <div class="entry">
3472       <div class="title">
3473         <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>
3474       </div>
3475       <div class="date">
3476         21st March 2014
3477       </div>
3478       <div class="body">
3479         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
3480 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
3481 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
3482 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
3483 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
3484 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
3485 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
3486
3487 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
3488 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
3489 tried using
3490 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
3491 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
3492 and program
3493 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
3494 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
3495 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
3496 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
3497 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
3498 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
3499 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
3500 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
3501 this method.</p>
3502
3503 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
3504 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
3505 problem is
3506 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
3507 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
3508 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
3509 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
3510 DVD structures, as the python library
3511 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
3512 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
3513 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
3514 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
3515 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
3516 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
3517
3518 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
3519 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
3520
3521       </div>
3522       <div class="tags">
3523
3524
3525         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>.
3526
3527
3528       </div>
3529     </div>
3530     <div class="padding"></div>
3531
3532     <div class="entry">
3533       <div class="title">
3534         <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>
3535       </div>
3536       <div class="date">
3537         14th March 2014
3538       </div>
3539       <div class="body">
3540         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
3541 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
3542 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
3543 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
3544 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
3545 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
3546 release (0.2).</p>
3547
3548 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
3549 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
3550 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
3551 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
3552 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
3553 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
3554 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
3555 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
3556 and build using
3557 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
3558 with a user with sudo access to become root:
3559
3560 <pre>
3561 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
3562   freedom-maker
3563 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
3564   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
3565   u-boot-tools
3566 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
3567 </pre>
3568
3569 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
3570 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
3571 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
3572 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
3573 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
3574 kpartx call.</p>
3575
3576 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
3577 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
3578 the preseed values:</p>
3579
3580 <pre>
3581 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
3582 </pre>
3583
3584 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
3585 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
3586 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
3587 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
3588 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
3589 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
3590
3591 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
3592 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
3593 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
3594 irc.debian.org)</a> and
3595 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
3596 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
3597
3598       </div>
3599       <div class="tags">
3600
3601
3602         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>.
3603
3604
3605       </div>
3606     </div>
3607     <div class="padding"></div>
3608
3609     <div class="entry">
3610       <div class="title">
3611         <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>
3612       </div>
3613       <div class="date">
3614         12th March 2014
3615       </div>
3616       <div class="body">
3617         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
3618 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
3619 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
3620 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
3621 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
3622 document this better when one of the customers of
3623 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
3624 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
3625 get this working are the following:</p>
3626
3627 <p><ol>
3628
3629 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
3630 example host here.</li>
3631
3632 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
3633 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
3634
3635 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
3636 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
3637
3638 </ol></p>
3639
3640 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
3641 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
3642 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
3643 started).</p>
3644
3645 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
3646 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
3647
3648 <p><blockquote><pre>
3649 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
3650 Export list for nas-server:
3651 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
3652 root@tjener:~#
3653 </pre></blockquote></p>
3654
3655 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
3656 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
3657 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
3658 NFS access.</p>
3659
3660 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
3661 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
3662 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
3663
3664 <p><blockquote><pre>
3665 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3666 </pre></blockquote></p>
3667
3668 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
3669 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
3670 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
3671 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
3672
3673 <p><blockquote><pre>
3674 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3675 objectClass: automount
3676 cn: nas-server
3677 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3678
3679 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3680 objectClass: top
3681 objectClass: automountMap
3682 ou: auto.nas-server
3683
3684 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3685 objectClass: automount
3686 cn: /
3687 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
3688 </pre></blockquote></p>
3689
3690 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
3691 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
3692 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
3693
3694 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
3695 the storage server directly by just visiting the
3696 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
3697 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
3698
3699       </div>
3700       <div class="tags">
3701
3702
3703         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>.
3704
3705
3706       </div>
3707     </div>
3708     <div class="padding"></div>
3709
3710     <div class="entry">
3711       <div class="title">
3712         <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>
3713       </div>
3714       <div class="date">
3715         22nd February 2014
3716       </div>
3717       <div class="body">
3718         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
3719 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
3720 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
3721 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
3722 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
3723 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
3724 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
3725 proper home since then.</p>
3726
3727 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
3728 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
3729 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
3730 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
3731 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
3732
3733 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
3734 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
3735 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
3736 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
3737 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
3738 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
3739 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
3740 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
3741 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
3742
3743       </div>
3744       <div class="tags">
3745
3746
3747         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>.
3748
3749
3750       </div>
3751     </div>
3752     <div class="padding"></div>
3753
3754     <div class="entry">
3755       <div class="title">
3756         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
3757       </div>
3758       <div class="date">
3759          3rd February 2014
3760       </div>
3761       <div class="body">
3762         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
3763 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
3764 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
3765 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
3766 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
3767 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
3768 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
3769 <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>,
3770 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
3771
3772 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
3773 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
3774 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
3775 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
3776 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
3777 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
3778
3779 <p><blockquote><pre>
3780 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
3781 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
3782 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
3783 dhclient /dev/eth0
3784 </pre></blockquote></p>
3785
3786 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
3787 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
3788 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
3789
3790 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
3791 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
3792 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
3793 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
3794 side.</p>
3795
3796 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
3797 stuff:</p>
3798
3799 <p><blockquote><pre>
3800 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3801 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
3802 EOF
3803 apt-get update
3804 apt-get dist-upgrade
3805 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
3806     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
3807 update-alternatives --config runsystem
3808 </pre></blockquote></p>
3809
3810 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
3811 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
3812 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
3813 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
3814 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
3815 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
3816 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
3817 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
3818 ssh instead.
3819
3820 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
3821 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
3822 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
3823 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
3824 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
3825 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
3826
3827 <p><blockquote><pre>
3828 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3829 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
3830 EOF
3831 </pre></blockquote></p>
3832
3833 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
3834 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
3835 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
3836 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
3837
3838 <p><blockquote><pre>
3839 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
3840 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
3841 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
3842 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
3843 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
3844 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
3845 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
3846 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
3847 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
3848 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
3849 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
3850 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
3851 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
3852 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
3853 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
3854 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
3855 #
3856 </pre></blockquote></p>
3857
3858 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
3859 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
3860 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
3861 command line stuff.<p>
3862
3863       </div>
3864       <div class="tags">
3865
3866
3867         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>.
3868
3869
3870       </div>
3871     </div>
3872     <div class="padding"></div>
3873
3874     <div class="entry">
3875       <div class="title">
3876         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
3877       </div>
3878       <div class="date">
3879         29th January 2014
3880       </div>
3881       <div class="body">
3882         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
3883 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
3884 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
3885 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
3886 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
3887 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
3888 investigated in
3889 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
3890 from December 2013, in the article
3891 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
3892 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
3893 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
3894 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
3895 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
3896 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
3897 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
3898 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
3899
3900 <p><blockquote>
3901 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
3902 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
3903 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
3904 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
3905 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
3906 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
3907 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
3908 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
3909 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
3910 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
3911 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
3912 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
3913
3914 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
3915 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
3916 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
3917 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
3918 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
3919 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
3920 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
3921 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
3922 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
3923 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
3924 </blockquote><p>
3925
3926 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
3927 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
3928 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
3929 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
3930 summarized like this:</p>
3931
3932 <p><blockquote>
3933 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
3934 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
3935 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
3936 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
3937 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
3938 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
3939 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
3940 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
3941 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
3942 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
3943 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
3944 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
3945 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
3946 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
3947 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
3948 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
3949 </blockquote></p>
3950
3951 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
3952 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
3953 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
3954 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
3955
3956 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3957 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3958 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3959
3960       </div>
3961       <div class="tags">
3962
3963
3964         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>.
3965
3966
3967       </div>
3968     </div>
3969     <div class="padding"></div>
3970
3971     <div class="entry">
3972       <div class="title">
3973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
3974       </div>
3975       <div class="date">
3976         14th January 2014
3977       </div>
3978       <div class="body">
3979         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
3980 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
3981 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
3982 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
3983 the source.  The company behind it provide
3984 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
3985 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
3986 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
3987 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
3988 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
3989 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
3990 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
3991 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
3992 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
3993 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
3994 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
3995 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
3996 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
3997 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
3998 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
3999 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
4000 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
4001 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
4002 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
4003
4004 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
4005
4006 <ul>
4007
4008   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
4009   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
4010   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
4011
4012 </ul>
4013
4014 <p>You can
4015 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
4016 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
4017 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
4018 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
4019 include a test suite check.</p>
4020
4021       </div>
4022       <div class="tags">
4023
4024
4025         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>.
4026
4027
4028       </div>
4029     </div>
4030     <div class="padding"></div>
4031
4032     <div class="entry">
4033       <div class="title">
4034         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
4035       </div>
4036       <div class="date">
4037         25th December 2013
4038       </div>
4039       <div class="body">
4040         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4041 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
4042 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
4043 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
4044 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
4045 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
4046 George</a>.</p>
4047
4048 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
4049
4050 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
4051
4052 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
4053 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
4054 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
4055 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
4056 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
4057 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
4058
4059 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
4060 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
4061 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
4062 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
4063 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
4064 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
4065 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
4066 to help building another school's informational education concept from
4067 scratch.</p>
4068
4069 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
4070 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
4071 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
4072
4073 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
4074 and cycling.</p>
4075
4076 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
4077 project?</strong></p>
4078
4079 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
4080 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
4081 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
4082 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
4083 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
4084 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
4085
4086 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
4087 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
4088 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
4089 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
4090 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
4091 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
4092 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
4093 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
4094 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
4095
4096 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
4097 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
4098 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
4099 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
4100
4101 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4102 Edu?</strong></p>
4103
4104 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
4105 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
4106 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
4107 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
4108 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
4109 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
4110 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
4111 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
4112 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
4113 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
4114 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
4115 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
4116 that it rocks!</p>
4117
4118 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
4119 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
4120 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
4121 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
4122 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
4123 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
4124 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
4125
4126 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4127 Edu?</strong></p>
4128
4129 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
4130 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
4131 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
4132 can list a few points about that:</p>
4133
4134 <ul>
4135
4136  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
4137  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
4138  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
4139
4140 </ul>
4141
4142 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
4143
4144 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
4145
4146 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
4147 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
4148 year.</p>
4149
4150 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
4151 run text tools. I use
4152 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
4153 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
4154 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
4155 based full-featured student management software with the two),
4156 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
4157 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
4158 coloured world called the WWW, I use
4159 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
4160 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
4161 e-mail.</p>
4162
4163 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
4164 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
4165 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
4166 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
4167 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
4168 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
4169 Facebook now ;).</p>
4170
4171 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4172 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
4173
4174 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
4175 side is what I have experienced.</p>
4176
4177 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
4178 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
4179 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
4180 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
4181 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
4182 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
4183 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
4184 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
4185 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
4186 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
4187 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
4188 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
4189 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
4190 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
4191 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
4192 plain criminal.</p>
4193
4194 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
4195 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
4196 founded an association named
4197 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
4198 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
4199 area of free and open source software, for example the
4200 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
4201 Teckids and are the youth programme of
4202 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
4203 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
4204 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
4205 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
4206 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
4207 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
4208
4209 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
4210 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
4211 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
4212 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
4213 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
4214 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
4215 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
4216 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
4217 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
4218 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
4219 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
4220 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
4221
4222 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
4223 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
4224 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
4225 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
4226
4227 <!--
4228
4229 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
4230
4231 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
4232 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
4233
4234  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
4235    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
4236    of the decision makers above;
4237  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
4238    knowledge about free software
4239
4240 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
4241
4242 -->
4243
4244       </div>
4245       <div class="tags">
4246
4247
4248         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>.
4249
4250
4251       </div>
4252     </div>
4253     <div class="padding"></div>
4254
4255     <div class="entry">
4256       <div class="title">
4257         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
4258       </div>
4259       <div class="date">
4260          6th December 2013
4261       </div>
4262       <div class="body">
4263         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
4264 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
4265 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
4266 had a new school administrator show up on
4267 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
4268 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
4269 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
4270 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
4271 Germany a few years ago.</p>
4272
4273 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
4274
4275 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
4276 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
4277 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
4278 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
4279
4280 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
4281 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
4282 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
4283 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
4284 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
4285 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
4286 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
4287 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
4288 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
4289
4290 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
4291 project?</strong></p>
4292
4293 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
4294 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
4295 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
4296 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
4297
4298 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4299 Edu?</strong></p>
4300
4301 <ul>
4302   <li>Quick installation,</li>
4303   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
4304   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
4305   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
4306     single company,</li>
4307   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
4308     experience and problem solutions.</li>
4309 </ul>
4310
4311 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4312 Edu?</strong></p>
4313
4314 <ul>
4315   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
4316   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
4317   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
4318   working again reliably.
4319
4320   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
4321   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
4322   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
4323   as their base.
4324
4325   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
4326   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
4327   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
4328   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
4329   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
4330   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
4331
4332   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
4333   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
4334   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
4335   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
4336   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
4337   schemes.</li>
4338
4339   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
4340   compared to Debian.</li>
4341
4342 </ul>
4343
4344 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
4345 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
4346 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
4347 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
4348
4349 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
4350
4351 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
4352 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
4353 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
4354 programming languages for teaching.</p>
4355
4356 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4357 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
4358
4359 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
4360
4361 <ul>
4362
4363   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
4364     teaching and learning.</li>
4365
4366   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
4367     home, and at their working place without running into license or
4368     conversion problems.</li>
4369
4370   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
4371     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
4372     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
4373     science, not products.</li>
4374
4375   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
4376     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
4377
4378 </ul>
4379
4380       </div>
4381       <div class="tags">
4382
4383
4384         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>.
4385
4386
4387       </div>
4388     </div>
4389     <div class="padding"></div>
4390
4391     <div class="entry">
4392       <div class="title">
4393         <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>
4394       </div>
4395       <div class="date">
4396         30th November 2013
4397       </div>
4398       <div class="body">
4399         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
4400 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
4401 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
4402 experiment with interesting network technology, the
4403 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
4404 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
4405 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
4406 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
4407 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
4408 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
4409 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
4410 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
4411 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
4412 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
4413 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
4414 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
4415 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
4416 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
4417 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
4418 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
4419
4420       </div>
4421       <div class="tags">
4422
4423
4424         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>.
4425
4426
4427       </div>
4428     </div>
4429     <div class="padding"></div>
4430
4431     <div class="entry">
4432       <div class="title">
4433         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
4434       </div>
4435       <div class="date">
4436         24th November 2013
4437       </div>
4438       <div class="body">
4439         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
4440 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
4441 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
4442 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
4443 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
4444 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
4445 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
4446 is working on.  I checked the
4447 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
4448 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
4449 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
4450 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
4451 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
4452 These are the release notes:</p>
4453
4454 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
4455
4456 <ul>
4457
4458   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
4459    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
4460    up.</li>
4461
4462   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
4463
4464   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
4465    Matthias Klose.</li>
4466
4467   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
4468    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
4469
4470   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
4471    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
4472    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
4473
4474 </ul>
4475
4476 <p>You can
4477 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
4478 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
4479 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
4480 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
4481 include a testsuite check.</p>
4482
4483       </div>
4484       <div class="tags">
4485
4486
4487         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>.
4488
4489
4490       </div>
4491     </div>
4492     <div class="padding"></div>
4493
4494     <div class="entry">
4495       <div class="title">
4496         <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>
4497       </div>
4498       <div class="date">
4499         21st November 2013
4500       </div>
4501       <div class="body">
4502         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
4503 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
4504 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
4505 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
4506 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
4507 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
4508 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
4509 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
4510 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
4511 TED talk
4512 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
4513 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
4514 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
4515
4516 <blockquote>
4517
4518 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
4519 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
4520 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
4521 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
4522 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
4523 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
4524 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
4525 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
4526 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
4527 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
4528 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
4529
4530 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
4531 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
4532 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
4533
4534 </blockquote>
4535
4536 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
4537 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
4538 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
4539 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
4540 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
4541 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
4542 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
4543 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
4544 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
4545
4546       </div>
4547       <div class="tags">
4548
4549
4550         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>.
4551
4552
4553       </div>
4554     </div>
4555     <div class="padding"></div>
4556
4557     <div class="entry">
4558       <div class="title">
4559         <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>
4560       </div>
4561       <div class="date">
4562         13th November 2013
4563       </div>
4564       <div class="body">
4565         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
4566 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
4567 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
4568 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
4569 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
4570 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
4571 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
4572 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
4573 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
4574 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
4575 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
4576 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
4577 right away. :)</p>
4578
4579       </div>
4580       <div class="tags">
4581
4582
4583         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>.
4584
4585
4586       </div>
4587     </div>
4588     <div class="padding"></div>
4589
4590     <div class="entry">
4591       <div class="title">
4592         <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>
4593       </div>
4594       <div class="date">
4595         10th November 2013
4596       </div>
4597       <div class="body">
4598         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
4599 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
4600 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
4601 MR3040 as a mesh node using
4602 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
4603
4604 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
4605 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
4606 and downloaded
4607 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
4608 recommended firmware image</a>
4609 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
4610 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
4611 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
4612 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
4613 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
4614
4615 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
4616 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
4617 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
4618 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
4619 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
4620 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
4621 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
4622 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
4623 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
4624 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
4625 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
4626 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
4627 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
4628
4629 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
4630 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
4631 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
4632 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
4633 them:</p>
4634
4635 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
4636
4637 <pre>
4638
4639 config interface 'loopback'
4640         option ifname 'lo'
4641         option proto 'static'
4642         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
4643         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
4644
4645 config globals 'globals'
4646         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
4647
4648 config interface 'lan'
4649         option ifname 'eth0'
4650         option type 'bridge'
4651         option proto 'dhcp'
4652         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
4653         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
4654         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
4655         option ip6assign '60'
4656
4657 config interface 'mesh'
4658         option ifname 'adhoc0'
4659         option mtu '1528'
4660         option proto 'batadv'
4661         option mesh 'bat0'
4662 </pre>
4663
4664 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
4665 <pre>
4666
4667 config wifi-device 'radio0'
4668         option type 'mac80211'
4669         option channel '11'
4670         option hwmode '11ng'
4671         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
4672         option htmode 'HT20'
4673         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
4674         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
4675         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
4676         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
4677         option disabled '0'
4678
4679 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
4680         option device 'radio0'
4681         option ifname 'adhoc0'
4682         option network 'mesh'
4683         option encryption 'none'
4684         option mode 'adhoc'
4685         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
4686         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
4687 </pre>
4688 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
4689 <pre>
4690
4691 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
4692         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
4693         option 'aggregated_ogms'
4694         option 'ap_isolation'
4695         option 'bonding'
4696         option 'fragmentation'
4697         option 'gw_bandwidth'
4698         option 'gw_mode'
4699         option 'gw_sel_class'
4700         option 'log_level'
4701         option 'orig_interval'
4702         option 'vis_mode'
4703         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
4704         option 'distributed_arp_table'
4705         option 'network_coding'
4706         option 'hop_penalty'
4707
4708 # yet another batX instance
4709 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
4710 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
4711 </pre>
4712
4713 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
4714 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
4715 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
4716
4717       </div>
4718       <div class="tags">
4719
4720
4721         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>.
4722
4723
4724       </div>
4725     </div>
4726     <div class="padding"></div>
4727
4728     <div class="entry">
4729       <div class="title">
4730         <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>
4731       </div>
4732       <div class="date">
4733          2nd November 2013
4734       </div>
4735       <div class="body">
4736         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
4737 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
4738 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
4739 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
4740 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
4741
4742 <p><pre>
4743 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
4744 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
4745 # Provides:          rsyslog
4746 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
4747 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
4748 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
4749 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
4750 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
4751 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
4752 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
4753 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
4754 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
4755 ### END INIT INFO
4756 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
4757 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
4758 </pre></p>
4759
4760 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
4761 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
4762 info/comments.</p>
4763
4764 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
4765 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
4766
4767 <p><pre>
4768 #!/bin/sh
4769
4770 # Define LSB log_* functions.
4771 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
4772 # and status_of_proc is working.
4773 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
4774
4775 #
4776 # Function that starts the daemon/service
4777
4778 #
4779 do_start()
4780 {
4781         # Return
4782         #   0 if daemon has been started
4783         #   1 if daemon was already running
4784         #   2 if daemon could not be started
4785         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
4786                 || return 1
4787         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
4788                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
4789                 || return 2
4790         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
4791         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
4792         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
4793 }
4794
4795 #
4796 # Function that stops the daemon/service
4797 #
4798 do_stop()
4799 {
4800         # Return
4801         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
4802         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
4803         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
4804         #   other if a failure occurred
4805         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4806         RETVAL="$?"
4807         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
4808         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
4809         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
4810         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
4811         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
4812         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
4813         # sleep for some time.
4814         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
4815         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
4816         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
4817         rm -f $PIDFILE
4818         return "$RETVAL"
4819 }
4820
4821 #
4822 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
4823 #
4824 do_reload() {
4825         #
4826         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
4827         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
4828         # then implement that here.
4829         #
4830         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4831         return 0
4832 }
4833
4834 SCRIPTNAME=$1
4835 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
4836 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
4837 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
4838     script="$1"
4839     shift
4840     . $script
4841 else
4842     exit 0
4843 fi
4844
4845 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
4846 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
4847
4848 # Exit if the package is not installed
4849 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
4850
4851 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
4852 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
4853
4854 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
4855 . /lib/init/vars.sh
4856
4857 case "$1" in
4858   start)
4859         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
4860         do_start
4861         case "$?" in
4862                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4863                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4864         esac
4865         ;;
4866   stop)
4867         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
4868         do_stop
4869         case "$?" in
4870                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4871                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4872         esac
4873         ;;
4874   status)
4875         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
4876         ;;
4877   #reload|force-reload)
4878         #
4879         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
4880         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
4881         #
4882         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
4883         #do_reload
4884         #log_end_msg $?
4885         #;;
4886   restart|force-reload)
4887         #
4888         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
4889         # 'force-reload' alias
4890         #
4891         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
4892         do_stop
4893         case "$?" in
4894           0|1)
4895                 do_start
4896                 case "$?" in
4897                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
4898                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
4899                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
4900                 esac
4901                 ;;
4902           *)
4903                 # Failed to stop
4904                 log_end_msg 1
4905                 ;;
4906         esac
4907         ;;
4908   *)
4909         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
4910         exit 3
4911         ;;
4912 esac
4913
4914 :
4915 </pre></p>
4916
4917 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
4918 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
4919 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
4920 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
4921
4922 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
4923 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
4924 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
4925 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
4926 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
4927
4928       </div>
4929       <div class="tags">
4930
4931
4932         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>.
4933
4934
4935       </div>
4936     </div>
4937     <div class="padding"></div>
4938
4939     <div class="entry">
4940       <div class="title">
4941         <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>
4942       </div>
4943       <div class="date">
4944          1st November 2013
4945       </div>
4946       <div class="body">
4947         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
4948 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
4949 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
4950 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
4951 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
4952 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
4953 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
4954 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
4955 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
4956 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
4957 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
4958 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
4959
4960 <p>The source is now available from
4961 <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>
4962
4963       </div>
4964       <div class="tags">
4965
4966
4967         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>.
4968
4969
4970       </div>
4971     </div>
4972     <div class="padding"></div>
4973
4974     <div class="entry">
4975       <div class="title">
4976         <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>
4977       </div>
4978       <div class="date">
4979         27th October 2013
4980       </div>
4981       <div class="body">
4982         <p>The
4983 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
4984 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
4985 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
4986 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
4987 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
4988 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
4989 of a plan to simplify the build system for
4990 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
4991 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
4992 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
4993 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
4994 Raspberry Pi.</p>
4995
4996 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
4997 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
4998 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
4999 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
5000 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
5001 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
5002 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
5003 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
5004 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
5005 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
5006 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
5007 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
5008 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
5009 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
5010 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
5011 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
5012 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
5013 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
5014 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
5015 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
5016 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
5017 available from
5018 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
5019 upstream project page</a>.</p>
5020
5021 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
5022 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
5023 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
5024 list:</p>
5025
5026 <p><pre>
5027 #!/bin/sh
5028 set -e # Exit on first error
5029 rootdir="$1"
5030 cd "$rootdir"
5031 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
5032 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
5033 EOF
5034 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
5035 # install a kernel somewhere too.
5036 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
5037     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
5038 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
5039 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
5040 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
5041 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
5042 </pre></p>
5043
5044 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
5045 to build the image:</p>
5046
5047 <pre>
5048 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
5049     --variant minbase \
5050     --arch armel \
5051     --distribution jessie \
5052     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
5053     --image test.img \
5054     --size 600M \
5055     --bootsize 64M \
5056     --boottype vfat \
5057     --log-level debug \
5058     --verbose \
5059     --no-kernel \
5060     --no-extlinux \
5061     --root-password raspberry \
5062     --hostname raspberrypi \
5063     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
5064     --customize `pwd`/customize \
5065     --package netbase \
5066     --package git-core \
5067     --package binutils \
5068     --package ca-certificates \
5069     --package wget \
5070     --package kmod
5071 </pre></p>
5072
5073 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
5074 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
5075 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
5076 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
5077 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
5078 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
5079 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
5080
5081 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
5082 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
5083 build dependency list.</p>
5084
5085 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
5086 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
5087 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
5088 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
5089
5090       </div>
5091       <div class="tags">
5092
5093
5094         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>.
5095
5096
5097       </div>
5098     </div>
5099     <div class="padding"></div>
5100
5101     <div class="entry">
5102       <div class="title">
5103         <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>
5104       </div>
5105       <div class="date">
5106         21st October 2013
5107       </div>
5108       <div class="body">
5109         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
5110 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
5111 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
5112 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
5113 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
5114 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
5115 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
5116 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
5117
5118 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
5119 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
5120 instead, I started playing with a
5121 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
5122 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
5123 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
5124 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
5125 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
5126 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
5127 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
5128 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
5129 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
5130 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
5131 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
5132 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
5133 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
5134 every client on the local network.</p>
5135
5136 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
5137 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
5138 and a script
5139 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
5140 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
5141 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
5142 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
5143 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
5144 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
5145 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
5146 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
5147 support.</p>
5148
5149 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
5150 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
5151
5152 <p><pre>
5153 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
5154     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
5155 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
5156 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
5157 %
5158 </pre></p>
5159
5160 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
5161 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
5162 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
5163 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
5164 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
5165 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
5166
5167 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
5168 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
5169 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
5170
5171 <p><table>
5172
5173 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
5174 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
5175 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
5176 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
5177 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
5178 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
5179
5180 </table></p>
5181
5182 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
5183 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
5184 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
5185 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
5186 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
5187 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
5188 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
5189
5190       </div>
5191       <div class="tags">
5192
5193
5194         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>.
5195
5196
5197       </div>
5198     </div>
5199     <div class="padding"></div>
5200
5201     <div class="entry">
5202       <div class="title">
5203         <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>
5204       </div>
5205       <div class="date">
5206         19th October 2013
5207       </div>
5208       <div class="body">
5209         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
5210 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
5211 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
5212 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
5213 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
5214 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
5215 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
5216 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
5217
5218       </div>
5219       <div class="tags">
5220
5221
5222         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>.
5223
5224
5225       </div>
5226     </div>
5227     <div class="padding"></div>
5228
5229     <div class="entry">
5230       <div class="title">
5231         <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>
5232       </div>
5233       <div class="date">
5234         15th October 2013
5235       </div>
5236       <div class="body">
5237         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
5238 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
5239 these. :)</p>
5240
5241 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
5242 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
5243 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
5244 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
5245 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
5246 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
5247 hope you will to. :)</p>
5248
5249 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
5250 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
5251 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
5252 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
5253 donated.  Are you next?</p>
5254
5255 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
5256 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
5257 statement under the heading
5258 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
5259 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
5260 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
5261 too.</p>
5262
5263       </div>
5264       <div class="tags">
5265
5266
5267         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
5268
5269
5270       </div>
5271     </div>
5272     <div class="padding"></div>
5273
5274     <div class="entry">
5275       <div class="title">
5276         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</a>
5277       </div>
5278       <div class="date">
5279         11th October 2013
5280       </div>
5281       <div class="body">
5282         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
5283 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
5284 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
5285 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
5286 successful examples like
5287 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
5288 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
5289 (see
5290 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
5291 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
5292 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
5293 can be seen from their
5294 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
5295 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
5296 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
5297 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
5298 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
5299
5300 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
5301 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
5302 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
5303 my recent involvement in
5304 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
5305 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
5306 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
5307 when possible, given that most communication between people are
5308 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
5309 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
5310 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
5311 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
5312 important over the years.</p>
5313
5314 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
5315 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
5316 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
5317 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
5318 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
5319 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
5320 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
5321 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
5322 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
5323 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
5324 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
5325 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
5326 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
5327 speakers about this talk (from
5328 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
5329
5330 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
5331
5332 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
5333 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
5334 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
5335 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
5336 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
5337 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
5338 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
5339 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
5340 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
5341 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
5342 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
5343 that project (from
5344 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
5345
5346 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
5347
5348 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
5349 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
5350 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
5351 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
5352 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
5353 based community mesh networks.</p>
5354
5355 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
5356 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
5357 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
5358 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
5359 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
5360 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
5361 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
5362 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
5363 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
5364
5365 <p><table>
5366 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
5367 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
5368 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
5369 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
5370 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
5371 </table></p>
5372
5373 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
5374 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
5375 VillageTelco about
5376 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
5377 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
5378 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
5379 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
5380 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
5381 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
5382
5383 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
5384 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
5385 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
5386 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
5387
5388 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
5389 us on IRC, either channel
5390 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
5391 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
5392 irc.freenode.net.</p>
5393
5394 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
5395 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
5396 and Innovation called
5397 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
5398 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
5399 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
5400 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
5401 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
5402 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
5403 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
5404 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
5405
5406 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
5407 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
5408 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
5409 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
5410 mesh system.</p>
5411
5412       </div>
5413       <div class="tags">
5414
5415
5416         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>.
5417
5418
5419       </div>
5420     </div>
5421     <div class="padding"></div>
5422
5423     <div class="entry">
5424       <div class="title">
5425         <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>
5426       </div>
5427       <div class="date">
5428          8th October 2013
5429       </div>
5430       <div class="body">
5431         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
5432 Salvador had published a
5433 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
5434 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
5435 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
5436 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
5437 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
5438 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
5439 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
5440 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
5441 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
5442 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
5443 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
5444 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
5445 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
5446 computers without hard drives by installing one central
5447 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
5448
5449 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
5450
5451 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
5452
5453 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
5454 me know. :)</p>
5455
5456       </div>
5457       <div class="tags">
5458
5459
5460         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>.
5461
5462
5463       </div>
5464     </div>
5465     <div class="padding"></div>
5466
5467     <div class="entry">
5468       <div class="title">
5469         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
5470       </div>
5471       <div class="date">
5472         29th September 2013
5473       </div>
5474       <div class="body">
5475         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
5476 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
5477 complete announcement text can be found at
5478 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
5479 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
5480
5481 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
5482 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
5483 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
5484 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
5485
5486       </div>
5487       <div class="tags">
5488
5489
5490         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>.
5491
5492
5493       </div>
5494     </div>
5495     <div class="padding"></div>
5496
5497     <div class="entry">
5498       <div class="title">
5499         <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>
5500       </div>
5501       <div class="date">
5502         27th September 2013
5503       </div>
5504       <div class="body">
5505         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
5506 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
5507 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
5508 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
5509
5510 <ul>
5511
5512 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
5513 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
5514
5515 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
5516 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
5517
5518 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
5519 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
5520 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
5521 (Youtube)</li>
5522
5523 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
5524 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
5525
5526 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
5527 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
5528
5529 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
5530 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
5531 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
5532
5533 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
5534 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
5535 (Youtube)</li>
5536
5537 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
5538 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
5539
5540 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
5541 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
5542
5543 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
5544 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
5545 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
5546
5547 </ul>
5548
5549 <p>A larger list is available from
5550 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
5551 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
5552
5553 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
5554 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
5555 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
5556 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
5557 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
5558 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
5559 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
5560 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
5561 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
5562 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5563 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5564
5565       </div>
5566       <div class="tags">
5567
5568
5569         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>.
5570
5571
5572       </div>
5573     </div>
5574     <div class="padding"></div>
5575
5576     <div class="entry">
5577       <div class="title">
5578         <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>
5579       </div>
5580       <div class="date">
5581         16th September 2013
5582       </div>
5583       <div class="body">
5584         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5585 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
5586
5587 <blockquote>
5588 <p>Hi,</p>
5589
5590 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
5591 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
5592 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
5593
5594 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
5595 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
5596 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
5597 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
5598
5599 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
5600 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
5601
5602 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
5603 compared to beta1:</p>
5604
5605 <ul>
5606
5607 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
5608 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
5609 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
5610 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
5611 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
5612 main server.</li>
5613 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
5614 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
5615 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
5616 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
5617 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
5618
5619 </ul>
5620
5621 <p>Where to get it:</p>
5622
5623 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5624
5625 <ul>
5626 <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>
5627 <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>
5628 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
5629 </ul>
5630
5631 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
5632
5633 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
5634 <ul>
5635 <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>
5636 <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>
5637 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
5638 </ul>
5639
5640 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
5641
5642 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
5643 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
5644 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
5645 as the other isos.</p>
5646
5647 <p>How to report bugs</p>
5648
5649 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
5650 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
5651
5652
5653 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
5654
5655 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
5656 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
5657 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
5658 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
5659 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
5660 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
5661 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
5662 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
5663 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
5664 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
5665 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
5666 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
5667 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5668
5669 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5670 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5671 Squeeze release.</p>
5672
5673 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
5674
5675 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5676 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5677 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
5678 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
5679 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
5680 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
5681 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
5682 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
5683 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
5684 directory.</p>
5685
5686
5687 <p>cheers,
5688 <br>        Holger</p>
5689 </blockquote>
5690
5691       </div>
5692       <div class="tags">
5693
5694
5695         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>.
5696
5697
5698       </div>
5699     </div>
5700     <div class="padding"></div>
5701
5702     <div class="entry">
5703       <div class="title">
5704         <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>
5705       </div>
5706       <div class="date">
5707         10th September 2013
5708       </div>
5709       <div class="body">
5710         <p>I was introduced to the
5711 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
5712 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
5713 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
5714 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
5715 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
5716 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
5717 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
5718 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
5719
5720 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
5721 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
5722 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
5723 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
5724 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
5725
5726 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
5727 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
5728 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
5729 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
5730 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
5731 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
5732 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
5733 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
5734 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
5735 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
5736 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
5737 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
5738 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
5739 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
5740 missing in Debian).</p>
5741
5742 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
5743 scripts
5744 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
5745 and a administrative web interface
5746 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
5747 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
5748 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
5749 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
5750 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
5751 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
5752 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
5753 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
5754 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
5755 this is really working yet, see
5756 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
5757 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
5758 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
5759 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
5760 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
5761 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
5762 with lots of half baked features.</p>
5763
5764 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
5765 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
5766 at.</p>
5767
5768 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
5769
5770 <ol>
5771
5772 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
5773 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
5774 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
5775 to the Debian installer:<p>
5776 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
5777
5778 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
5779 install on.</li>
5780
5781 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
5782 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
5783
5784 </ol>
5785
5786 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
5787
5788 <ol>
5789
5790 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
5791 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
5792 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
5793 <pre>
5794 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
5795 </pre></li>
5796 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
5797 <pre>
5798 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
5799    apt-key add -
5800 apt-get update
5801 apt-get install freedombox-setup
5802 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
5803 </pre></li>
5804 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
5805
5806 </ol>
5807
5808 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
5809 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
5810 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
5811 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
5812 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
5813
5814 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
5815 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
5816 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
5817 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
5818
5819 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
5820 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
5821 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
5822 irc.debian.org and the
5823 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
5824 mailing list</a>.</p>
5825
5826 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
5827 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
5828 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
5829 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
5830 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
5831 default password is 'secret'.</p>
5832
5833       </div>
5834       <div class="tags">
5835
5836
5837         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>.
5838
5839
5840       </div>
5841     </div>
5842     <div class="padding"></div>
5843
5844     <div class="entry">
5845       <div class="title">
5846         <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>
5847       </div>
5848       <div class="date">
5849         22nd August 2013
5850       </div>
5851       <div class="body">
5852         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5853 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
5854 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
5855
5856 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
5857
5858 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5859 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5860
5861 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5862
5863 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5864 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5865 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5866 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5867 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5868 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5869 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5870 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
5871 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5872 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5873 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5874 desktop contains
5875 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5876 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5877 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5878 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5879
5880 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
5881 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
5882 release.</p>
5883
5884 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5885 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5886 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
5887 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
5888 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
5889 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
5890 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
5891 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
5892 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
5893 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
5894 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
5895
5896 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5897
5898 <ul>
5899
5900 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
5901     work also without a attached tty.</li>
5902 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
5903     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
5904     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
5905     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
5906     required).</li>
5907
5908 </ul>
5909
5910 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5911
5912 <ul>
5913
5914 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
5915 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
5916 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
5917 stick ISO image.</li>
5918 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
5919 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
5920 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
5921     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
5922     cope with this.</li>
5923 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
5924 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
5925     empty password hashes.</li>
5926 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
5927     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
5928     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
5929
5930 </ul>
5931
5932 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5933
5934 <ul>
5935
5936 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
5937     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
5938 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
5939     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
5940
5941 </ul>
5942
5943 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5944
5945 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5946
5947 <ul>
5948
5949 <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>
5950
5951 <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>
5952
5953 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
5954
5955 </ul>
5956
5957 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
5958 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
5959
5960 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5961
5962 <ul>
5963
5964 <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>
5965 <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>
5966 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
5967
5968 </ul>
5969
5970 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
5971 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
5972
5973
5974 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5975
5976 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
5977
5978       </div>
5979       <div class="tags">
5980
5981
5982         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>.
5983
5984
5985       </div>
5986     </div>
5987     <div class="padding"></div>
5988
5989     <div class="entry">
5990       <div class="title">
5991         <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>
5992       </div>
5993       <div class="date">
5994         18th August 2013
5995       </div>
5996       <div class="body">
5997         <p>Earlier, I reported about
5998 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
5999 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
6000 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
6001 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
6002 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
6003 currently on the disk.</p>
6004
6005 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
6006 <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>
6007 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
6008 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
6009 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
6010 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
6011 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
6012 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
6013 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
6014 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
6015 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
6016 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
6017 the broken disks.</p>
6018
6019       </div>
6020       <div class="tags">
6021
6022
6023         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>.
6024
6025
6026       </div>
6027     </div>
6028     <div class="padding"></div>
6029
6030     <div class="entry">
6031       <div class="title">
6032         <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>
6033       </div>
6034       <div class="date">
6035          2nd August 2013
6036       </div>
6037       <div class="body">
6038         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
6039 have worked on a Norwegian
6040 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
6041 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
6042 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
6043 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
6044 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
6045 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
6046 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
6047 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
6048 progress of the translation:</p>
6049
6050 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
6051
6052 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
6053 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
6054 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
6055 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
6056 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
6057 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
6058 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
6059 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
6060 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
6061 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
6062 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
6063
6064 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
6065 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
6066 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
6067 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
6068 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
6069 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
6070 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
6071 project files currently available from
6072 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
6073
6074 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
6075 the updated
6076 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
6077 and
6078 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
6079 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
6080 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
6081 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
6082
6083       </div>
6084       <div class="tags">
6085
6086
6087         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>.
6088
6089
6090       </div>
6091     </div>
6092     <div class="padding"></div>
6093
6094     <div class="entry">
6095       <div class="title">
6096         <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>
6097       </div>
6098       <div class="date">
6099         27th July 2013
6100       </div>
6101       <div class="body">
6102         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
6103 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
6104
6105 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
6106 2013-07-27</strong></p>
6107
6108 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6109 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
6110
6111 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
6112
6113 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
6114 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
6115 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
6116 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
6117 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
6118 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
6119 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
6120 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
6121 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
6122 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
6123 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
6124 desktop contains
6125 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
6126 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
6127 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
6128 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
6129
6130 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
6131 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
6132 Squeeze release.</p>
6133
6134 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
6135 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
6136 release.</p>
6137
6138 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
6139
6140 <ul>
6141
6142 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
6143    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
6144 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
6145    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
6146    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
6147    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
6148    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
6149 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
6150 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
6151 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
6152    crash bugs.</li>
6153
6154 </ul>
6155
6156 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
6157
6158 <ul>
6159
6160 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
6161    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
6162 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
6163    netinst CD.</li>
6164 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
6165    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
6166 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
6167    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
6168    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
6169 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
6170    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
6171    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
6172 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
6173    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
6174    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
6175 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
6176    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
6177 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
6178
6179 </ul>
6180
6181 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
6182
6183 <ul>
6184
6185 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
6186 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
6187     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
6188 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
6189
6190 </ul>
6191
6192 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
6193
6194 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
6195
6196 <ul>
6197
6198 <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>
6199
6200 <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>
6201
6202 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
6203
6204 </ul>
6205
6206 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
6207 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
6208
6209 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
6210
6211 <ul>
6212
6213 <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>
6214 <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>
6215 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
6216
6217 </ul>
6218
6219 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
6220 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
6221
6222
6223 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
6224
6225 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
6226
6227       </div>
6228       <div class="tags">
6229
6230
6231         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>.
6232
6233
6234       </div>
6235     </div>
6236     <div class="padding"></div>
6237
6238     <div class="entry">
6239       <div class="title">
6240         <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>
6241       </div>
6242       <div class="date">
6243         17th July 2013
6244       </div>
6245       <div class="body">
6246         <p>Today I switched to
6247 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
6248 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
6249 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
6250 <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
6251 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
6252 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
6253 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
6254 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
6255 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
6256 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
6257 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
6258 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
6259 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
6260 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
6261 station from now on.</p>
6262
6263 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
6264 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
6265 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
6266 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
6267 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
6268 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
6269 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
6270 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
6271 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
6272 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
6273 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
6274 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
6275
6276 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
6277 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
6278 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
6279 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
6280 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
6281 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
6282 parameters are tuned:</p>
6283
6284 <ul>
6285
6286 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
6287     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
6288
6289 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
6290     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
6291     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
6292
6293 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
6294     systems.</li>
6295
6296 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
6297     /etc/fstab.</li>
6298
6299 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
6300
6301 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
6302     cron.daily).</li>
6303
6304 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
6305     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
6306
6307 </ul>
6308
6309 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
6310 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
6311 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
6312 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
6313 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
6314 from getting the data on the disk (see
6315 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
6316 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
6317 right thing to do.</p>
6318
6319 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
6320 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
6321 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
6322
6323 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
6324 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
6325 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
6326 instead of during my work.</p>
6327
6328 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
6329 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
6330
6331 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
6332 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
6333 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
6334
6335 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
6336 there.</p>
6337
6338 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
6339 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
6340 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
6341 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
6342 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
6343 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
6344 back.</p>
6345
6346       </div>
6347       <div class="tags">
6348
6349
6350         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>.
6351
6352
6353       </div>
6354     </div>
6355     <div class="padding"></div>
6356
6357     <div class="entry">
6358       <div class="title">
6359         <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>
6360       </div>
6361       <div class="date">
6362         10th July 2013
6363       </div>
6364       <div class="body">
6365         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
6366 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
6367 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
6368 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
6369 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
6370 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
6371 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
6372 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
6373
6374 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
6375 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
6376 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
6377 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
6378 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
6379 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
6380 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
6381 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
6382 lock up when I download a new
6383 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
6384 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
6385 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
6386
6387 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6388 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
6389 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6390 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
6391 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6392 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6393
6394 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6395 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
6396 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6397 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
6398 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6399 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6400
6401 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
6402 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
6403 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
6404 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
6405 exist).</p>
6406
6407       </div>
6408       <div class="tags">
6409
6410
6411         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>.
6412
6413
6414       </div>
6415     </div>
6416     <div class="padding"></div>
6417
6418     <div class="entry">
6419       <div class="title">
6420         <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>
6421       </div>
6422       <div class="date">
6423          9th July 2013
6424       </div>
6425       <div class="body">
6426         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
6427 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
6428 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
6429 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
6430 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6431 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
6432 Bitraf</a>.</p>
6433
6434 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
6435 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
6436 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
6437 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
6438 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
6439
6440       </div>
6441       <div class="tags">
6442
6443
6444         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>.
6445
6446
6447       </div>
6448     </div>
6449     <div class="padding"></div>
6450
6451     <div class="entry">
6452       <div class="title">
6453         <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>
6454       </div>
6455       <div class="date">
6456          5th July 2013
6457       </div>
6458       <div class="body">
6459         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
6460 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
6461 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
6462 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
6463 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
6464 ended up picking a
6465 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
6466 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
6467 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
6468 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
6469 on that below.</p>
6470
6471 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
6472 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
6473 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
6474 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
6475 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
6476 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
6477 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
6478 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
6479 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
6480
6481 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
6482 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
6483 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
6484 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
6485 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
6486 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
6487 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
6488
6489 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
6490 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
6491
6492 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
6493 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
6494 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
6495 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
6496 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
6497 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
6498 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
6499 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
6500 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
6501 kernel developers as
6502 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
6503 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
6504 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
6505 Lenovo forums, both for
6506 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
6507 2012-11-10</a> and for
6508 <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
6509 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
6510 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
6511 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
6512 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
6513 There is even a
6514 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
6515 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
6516 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
6517
6518 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
6519 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
6520 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
6521 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
6522 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
6523 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
6524 fixed. :)</p>
6525
6526       </div>
6527       <div class="tags">
6528
6529
6530         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>.
6531
6532
6533       </div>
6534     </div>
6535     <div class="padding"></div>
6536
6537     <div class="entry">
6538       <div class="title">
6539         <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>
6540       </div>
6541       <div class="date">
6542          4th July 2013
6543       </div>
6544       <div class="body">
6545         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
6546 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
6547 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
6548 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
6549 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
6550 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
6551 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
6552 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
6553 with an expencive door stop.</p>
6554
6555 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
6556 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
6557 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
6558 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
6559 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
6560 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
6561 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
6562
6563 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
6564 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
6565 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
6566 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
6567 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
6568 new laptop now. :)</p>
6569
6570 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
6571
6572       </div>
6573       <div class="tags">
6574
6575
6576         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>.
6577
6578
6579       </div>
6580     </div>
6581     <div class="padding"></div>
6582
6583     <div class="entry">
6584       <div class="title">
6585         <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>
6586       </div>
6587       <div class="date">
6588          3rd July 2013
6589       </div>
6590       <div class="body">
6591         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
6592 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
6593
6594 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
6595 2013-07-03</strong></p>
6596
6597 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6598 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
6599
6600 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
6601
6602 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
6603 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
6604 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
6605 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
6606 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
6607 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
6608 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
6609 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
6610 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
6611 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
6612 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
6613 desktop contains
6614 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
6615 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
6616 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
6617 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
6618
6619 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
6620 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
6621 Squeeze release.</p>
6622
6623 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
6624 <ul>
6625   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
6626   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
6627     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
6628     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
6629   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
6630     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
6631     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
6632   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
6633     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
6634     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
6635     too.</li>
6636   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
6637     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
6638 </ul>
6639 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
6640 <ul>
6641   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
6642   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
6643   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
6644     up for some language options.</li>
6645   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
6646   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
6647   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
6648     d-i is doing it.</li>
6649   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
6650     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
6651   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
6652     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
6653     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
6654   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
6655     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
6656   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
6657   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
6658     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
6659   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
6660     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
6661 </ul>
6662 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
6663 <ul>
6664   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
6665     available yet (698840).</li>
6666   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
6667 </ul>
6668 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
6669
6670 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
6671 <ul>
6672   <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>
6673   <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>
6674   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
6675 </ul>
6676
6677 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
6678 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
6679
6680 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
6681 <ul>
6682   <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>
6683   <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>
6684   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
6685 </ul>
6686
6687 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
6688 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
6689
6690 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
6691
6692 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
6693
6694       </div>
6695       <div class="tags">
6696
6697
6698         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>.
6699
6700
6701       </div>
6702     </div>
6703     <div class="padding"></div>
6704
6705     <div class="entry">
6706       <div class="title">
6707         <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>
6708       </div>
6709       <div class="date">
6710         25th June 2013
6711       </div>
6712       <div class="body">
6713         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
6714 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
6715 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
6716 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
6717 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
6718 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
6719 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
6720 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
6721 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
6722 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
6723 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
6724
6725 <p><pre>
6726 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
6727 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
6728 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
6729 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
6730 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
6731 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
6732 firmware-ipw2x00
6733 firmware-ipw2x00
6734 Preconfiguring packages ...
6735 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
6736 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
6737 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
6738 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
6739 #
6740 </pre></p>
6741
6742 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
6743 printed instead:</p>
6744
6745 <p><pre>
6746 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
6747 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
6748 #
6749 </pre></p>
6750
6751 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
6752 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
6753
6754 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
6755 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
6756 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
6757 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
6758 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
6759 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
6760 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
6761 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
6762 machine.</p>
6763
6764 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
6765 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
6766 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
6767 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
6768 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
6769 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
6770
6771       </div>
6772       <div class="tags">
6773
6774
6775         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>.
6776
6777
6778       </div>
6779     </div>
6780     <div class="padding"></div>
6781
6782     <div class="entry">
6783       <div class="title">
6784         <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>
6785       </div>
6786       <div class="date">
6787         22nd June 2013
6788       </div>
6789       <div class="body">
6790         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6791 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
6792 which check that services are running, working, and return the
6793 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
6794 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
6795 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
6796 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
6797 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
6798 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
6799
6800 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
6801 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
6802 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
6803 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
6804 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
6805 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
6806 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
6807 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
6808 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
6809 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
6810 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
6811 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
6812 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
6813 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
6814
6815 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
6816 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
6817 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
6818 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
6819 the problem.</p>
6820
6821 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
6822 please join us on
6823 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
6824 irc.debian.org</a> and the
6825 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
6826 list.</p>
6827
6828       </div>
6829       <div class="tags">
6830
6831
6832         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>.
6833
6834
6835       </div>
6836     </div>
6837     <div class="padding"></div>
6838
6839     <div class="entry">
6840       <div class="title">
6841         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
6842       </div>
6843       <div class="date">
6844         17th June 2013
6845       </div>
6846       <div class="body">
6847         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
6848 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
6849 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
6850 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
6851 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
6852 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
6853 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
6854 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
6855
6856 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6857
6858 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
6859 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
6860 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
6861 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
6862 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
6863 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
6864 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
6865 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
6866 field.</p>
6867
6868 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
6869 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
6870 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
6871 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
6872 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
6873 the only one we have in our country.</p>
6874
6875 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6876 project?</strong></p>
6877
6878 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
6879 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
6880 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
6881 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
6882 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
6883 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
6884 ways to contribute.</p>
6885
6886 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
6887 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
6888 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
6889 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
6890 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
6891 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
6892 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
6893 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
6894 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
6895 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
6896
6897 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6898 Edu?</strong></p>
6899
6900 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
6901 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
6902 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
6903 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
6904 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
6905 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
6906 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
6907 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
6908
6909 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
6910 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
6911 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
6912 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
6913 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
6914 project.</p>
6915
6916 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6917 Edu?</strong></p>
6918
6919 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
6920 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
6921 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
6922 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
6923 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
6924 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
6925 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
6926 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
6927 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
6928
6929 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
6930 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
6931 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
6932 on.</p>
6933
6934 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6935
6936 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
6937 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
6938 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
6939 Enlightenment project a lot!),
6940 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
6941 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
6942 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
6943 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
6944 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
6945
6946 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6947 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6948
6949 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
6950 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
6951 that:</p>
6952
6953 <ul>
6954
6955 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
6956
6957 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
6958     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
6959     of teenagers more?</li>
6960
6961 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
6962     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
6963     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
6964     them!)</li>
6965
6966 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
6967     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
6968     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
6969
6970 </ul>
6971
6972 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
6973 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
6974 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
6975 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
6976 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
6977
6978       </div>
6979       <div class="tags">
6980
6981
6982         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>.
6983
6984
6985       </div>
6986     </div>
6987     <div class="padding"></div>
6988
6989     <div class="entry">
6990       <div class="title">
6991         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
6992       </div>
6993       <div class="date">
6994         12th June 2013
6995       </div>
6996       <div class="body">
6997         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
6998 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6999 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
7000 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
7001 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
7002 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
7003
7004 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7005
7006 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
7007 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
7008 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
7009
7010 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
7011 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
7012 each other.</p>
7013
7014 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7015 project?</strong></p>
7016
7017 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
7018 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
7019 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
7020 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
7021 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
7022 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
7023 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
7024 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
7025 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
7026 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
7027 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
7028 we'll get there one day.</p>
7029
7030 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7031 Edu?</strong></p>
7032
7033 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
7034 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
7035 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
7036 very high quality work.</p>
7037
7038 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
7039 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
7040 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
7041 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
7042 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
7043
7044 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7045 Edu?</strong></p>
7046
7047 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
7048 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
7049 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
7050
7051 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
7052 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
7053 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
7054 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
7055 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
7056 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
7057 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
7058 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
7059 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
7060 currently.</p>
7061
7062 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
7063 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
7064 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
7065 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
7066 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
7067 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
7068 autonomous.</p>
7069
7070 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7071
7072 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
7073 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
7074 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
7075 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
7076 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
7077
7078 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
7079 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
7080 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
7081 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
7082 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
7083 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
7084 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
7085 X.</p>
7086
7087 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
7088 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
7089 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
7090 it :p)
7091
7092 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7093 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7094
7095 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
7096 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
7097 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
7098 that.</p>
7099
7100 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
7101 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
7102 advantage of that.</p>
7103
7104 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
7105 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
7106 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
7107 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
7108 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
7109 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
7110 best solution for them.</p>
7111
7112 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
7113 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
7114 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
7115
7116       </div>
7117       <div class="tags">
7118
7119
7120         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>.
7121
7122
7123       </div>
7124     </div>
7125     <div class="padding"></div>
7126
7127     <div class="entry">
7128       <div class="title">
7129         <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>
7130       </div>
7131       <div class="date">
7132         11th June 2013
7133       </div>
7134       <div class="body">
7135         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
7136 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
7137 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
7138 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
7139 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
7140 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
7141 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
7142 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
7143 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
7144 i915 driver used by the
7145 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7146 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
7147
7148 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
7149 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
7150 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
7151 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
7152 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
7153
7154 <pre>
7155 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
7156 update-initramfs -u -k all
7157 </pre>
7158
7159 <p>Since March 2012 there is
7160 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
7161 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
7162 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
7163 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
7164 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
7165 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
7166 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
7167 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
7168 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
7169 number.</p>
7170
7171 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
7172 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
7173
7174 <p><pre>
7175 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
7176     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
7177     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
7178  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
7179  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
7180     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
7181  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
7182     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
7183  Latency: 0
7184  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
7185  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
7186  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
7187  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
7188  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
7189  Capabilities: <access denied>
7190  Kernel driver in use: i915
7191 </pre></p>
7192
7193 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
7194
7195 <p><pre>
7196 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
7197        ...
7198         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
7199         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
7200        ...
7201 }
7202 </pre></p>
7203
7204 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
7205 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
7206 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
7207 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
7208 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
7209 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
7210 yet shown up in
7211 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
7212 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
7213 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
7214 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
7215 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
7216 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
7217
7218 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
7219 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
7220 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
7221 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
7222 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
7223 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
7224 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
7225 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
7226 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
7227 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
7228 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
7229 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
7230
7231 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
7232 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
7233 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
7234 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
7235 backlight.</p>
7236
7237       </div>
7238       <div class="tags">
7239
7240
7241         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>.
7242
7243
7244       </div>
7245     </div>
7246     <div class="padding"></div>
7247
7248     <div class="entry">
7249       <div class="title">
7250         <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>
7251       </div>
7252       <div class="date">
7253         10th June 2013
7254       </div>
7255       <div class="body">
7256         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
7257 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
7258
7259 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
7260 2013-06-10</strong></p>
7261
7262 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
7263 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
7264
7265 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7266
7267 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
7268 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
7269 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
7270 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
7271 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
7272 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
7273 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
7274 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
7275 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
7276 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
7277 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
7278 desktop contains
7279 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
7280 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
7281 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
7282 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
7283
7284 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
7285 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
7286 Squeeze release.</p>
7287
7288 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7289
7290 <ul>
7291
7292 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
7293 <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).
7294 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
7295 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
7296 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
7297
7298 </ul>
7299
7300 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7301
7302 <ul>
7303
7304 <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.
7305 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
7306 <li>New Romanian translation.
7307 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
7308 <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).
7309 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
7310 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
7311 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
7312 <li>More testsuite tests.
7313 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
7314 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
7315
7316 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
7317 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
7318
7319 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
7320 them up with GOsa².</li>
7321
7322 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
7323
7324 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
7325 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
7326 entered password). </li>
7327
7328 </ul>
7329
7330 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7331
7332 <ul>
7333
7334 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
7335
7336 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
7337 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
7338 missing import feature).</li>
7339
7340 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
7341
7342 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
7343 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
7344 unfixed.</li>
7345
7346 </ul>
7347
7348 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7349
7350 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7351
7352 <ul>
7353
7354 <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>
7355
7356 <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>
7357
7358 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
7359
7360 </ul>
7361
7362 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
7363 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
7364
7365 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7366
7367 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
7368
7369       </div>
7370       <div class="tags">
7371
7372
7373         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>.
7374
7375
7376       </div>
7377     </div>
7378     <div class="padding"></div>
7379
7380     <div class="entry">
7381       <div class="title">
7382         <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>
7383       </div>
7384       <div class="date">
7385          5th June 2013
7386       </div>
7387       <div class="body">
7388         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
7389 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
7390 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
7391 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
7392 the project:
7393
7394 <ol>
7395
7396 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
7397   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
7398   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
7399   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
7400   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
7401
7402 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
7403   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
7404   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
7405   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
7406   #698840</a>.</li>
7407
7408 </ol>
7409
7410 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
7411 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
7412 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
7413
7414       </div>
7415       <div class="tags">
7416
7417
7418         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>.
7419
7420
7421       </div>
7422     </div>
7423     <div class="padding"></div>
7424
7425     <div class="entry">
7426       <div class="title">
7427         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
7428       </div>
7429       <div class="date">
7430          4th June 2013
7431       </div>
7432       <div class="body">
7433         <p>It has been a while since my last English
7434 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
7435 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
7436 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
7437 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
7438 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
7439
7440 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7441
7442 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
7443 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
7444 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
7445 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
7446
7447 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
7448 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
7449 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
7450
7451 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7452 project?</strong></p>
7453
7454 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
7455 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
7456 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
7457 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
7458 manual.
7459
7460 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
7461 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
7462 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
7463 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
7464
7465 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
7466 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
7467 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
7468 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
7469 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
7470 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
7471 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
7472 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
7473 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
7474 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
7475
7476 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
7477 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
7478 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
7479 beautiful project.</p>
7480
7481 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7482 Edu?</strong></p>
7483
7484 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
7485 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
7486 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
7487
7488 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
7489 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
7490 of educational free software.</p>
7491
7492 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7493 Edu?</strong></p>
7494
7495 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
7496 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
7497 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
7498 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
7499 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
7500
7501 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
7502 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
7503 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
7504 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
7505 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
7506 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
7507 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
7508 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
7509
7510 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7511
7512 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
7513 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
7514 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
7515 also using the mathematical software
7516 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
7517 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
7518 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
7519
7520 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
7521 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
7522 statistics?</strong></p>
7523
7524 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
7525 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
7526 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
7527 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
7528
7529 <ul>
7530
7531 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
7532 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
7533 constructions in planar geometry
7534
7535 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
7536 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
7537 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
7538
7539 </ul>
7540
7541 <p>I like also
7542 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
7543 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
7544 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
7545
7546 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7547 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7548
7549 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
7550
7551 <ul>
7552
7553 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
7554
7555 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
7556     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
7557     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
7558
7559 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
7560
7561 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
7562     system.</li>
7563
7564 </ul>
7565
7566       </div>
7567       <div class="tags">
7568
7569
7570         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>.
7571
7572
7573       </div>
7574     </div>
7575     <div class="padding"></div>
7576
7577     <div class="entry">
7578       <div class="title">
7579         <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>
7580       </div>
7581       <div class="date">
7582          1st June 2013
7583       </div>
7584       <div class="body">
7585         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7586 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
7587 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
7588 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
7589 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
7590 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
7591 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
7592 program.</p>
7593
7594 <!-- 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 -->
7595
7596 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
7597 <p>
7598 <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>
7599 <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>
7600 <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>
7601 <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>
7602 <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>
7603 <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>
7604 <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>
7605 <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>
7606 <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>
7607 <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>
7608 <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>
7609 <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>
7610 <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>
7611 <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>
7612 </p>
7613
7614 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
7615 <p>
7616 <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>
7617 <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>
7618 <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>
7619 <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>
7620 <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>
7621 <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>
7622 </p>
7623
7624 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
7625 <p>
7626 <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>
7627 </p>
7628
7629 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
7630 <p>
7631 <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>
7632 <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>
7633 <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>
7634 <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>
7635 <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>
7636 <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>
7637 <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>
7638 <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>
7639 <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>
7640 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
7641 <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>
7642 </p>
7643
7644 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
7645 <p>
7646 <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>
7647 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
7648 </p>
7649
7650 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
7651 <p>
7652 <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>
7653 <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>
7654 <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>
7655 </p>
7656
7657 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
7658 <p>
7659 <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>
7660 <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>
7661 <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>
7662 <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>
7663 <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>
7664 </p>
7665
7666 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
7667 <p>
7668 <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>
7669 <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>
7670 <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>
7671 <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>
7672 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
7673 <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>
7674 <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>
7675 <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>
7676 <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>
7677 <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>
7678 <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>
7679 <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>
7680 <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>
7681 <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>
7682 <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>
7683 <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>
7684 <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>
7685 </p>
7686
7687 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
7688 <p>
7689 <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>
7690 <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>
7691 </p>
7692
7693 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
7694 <p>
7695 <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>
7696 <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>
7697 <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>
7698 <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>
7699 <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>
7700 <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>
7701 <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>
7702 <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>
7703 <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>
7704 <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>
7705 </p>
7706
7707 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
7708 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
7709 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
7710 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
7711 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
7712 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
7713 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
7714
7715       </div>
7716       <div class="tags">
7717
7718
7719         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>.
7720
7721
7722       </div>
7723     </div>
7724     <div class="padding"></div>
7725
7726     <div class="entry">
7727       <div class="title">
7728         <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>
7729       </div>
7730       <div class="date">
7731         27th May 2013
7732       </div>
7733       <div class="body">
7734         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7735 <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
7736 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7737 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7738 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7739 and Windows 8.</p>
7740
7741 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7742 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7743 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7744 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7745 enough to tell.</p>
7746
7747 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7748 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7749 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7750 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7751 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7752 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7753 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7754 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7755 to follow.</p>
7756
7757 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7758 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7759 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7760 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7761 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7762 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7763 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7764 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7765
7766 <p>I've updated the
7767 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7768 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7769 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7770 machine.</p>
7771
7772 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7773 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7774
7775       </div>
7776       <div class="tags">
7777
7778
7779         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>.
7780
7781
7782       </div>
7783     </div>
7784     <div class="padding"></div>
7785
7786     <div class="entry">
7787       <div class="title">
7788         <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>
7789       </div>
7790       <div class="date">
7791         25th May 2013
7792       </div>
7793       <div class="body">
7794         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7795 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7796 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7797 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7798 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7799 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7800
7801 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7802 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7803 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7804 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7805 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7806 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7807 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7808 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7809 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7810 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7811
7812 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7813 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7814 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7815 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7816 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7817 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7818
7819 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7820 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7821 on new Laptops?</p>
7822
7823       </div>
7824       <div class="tags">
7825
7826
7827         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>.
7828
7829
7830       </div>
7831     </div>
7832     <div class="padding"></div>
7833
7834     <div class="entry">
7835       <div class="title">
7836         <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>
7837       </div>
7838       <div class="date">
7839         17th May 2013
7840       </div>
7841       <div class="body">
7842         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7843 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7844 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7845 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7846 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7847 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7848 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7849 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7850 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7851 donate some money</a>.
7852
7853 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7854 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7855 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7856 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7857 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7858
7859 <p>The script,
7860 <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/>
7861 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7862 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7863 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7864
7865 <ol>
7866
7867 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7868 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7869 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7870     our configuration.</li>
7871 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7872     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7873     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7874     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7875 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7876     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7877 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7878
7879 </ol>
7880
7881 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7882 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7883 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7884 the needed packages.</p>
7885
7886 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7887 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7888 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7889 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7890 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7891 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7892
7893 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7894 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7895 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7896
7897 <p><pre>
7898 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7899 DESKTOP="lxde"
7900 </pre></p>
7901
7902 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7903 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7904 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7905 boot.</p>
7906
7907       </div>
7908       <div class="tags">
7909
7910
7911         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>.
7912
7913
7914       </div>
7915     </div>
7916     <div class="padding"></div>
7917
7918     <div class="entry">
7919       <div class="title">
7920         <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>
7921       </div>
7922       <div class="date">
7923         14th May 2013
7924       </div>
7925       <div class="body">
7926         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7927 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
7928 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
7929
7930 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
7931 2013-05-14</strong></p>
7932
7933 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
7934 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
7935 codename "Wheezy".</p>
7936
7937 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7938
7939 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
7940 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7941 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
7942 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7943 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7944 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7945 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
7946 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
7947
7948 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
7949 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
7950 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
7951
7952 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7953 <ul>
7954   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
7955     default.</li>
7956   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
7957   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
7958   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
7959     ibus-anthy.</li>
7960 </ul>
7961
7962 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7963 <ul>
7964
7965   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
7966     reliability improvements.</li>
7967   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
7968     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
7969   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
7970     problems.</li>
7971   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
7972     direct:// URL.</li>
7973   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
7974   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
7975   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
7976   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
7977     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
7978   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
7979     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
7980 </ul>
7981
7982 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7983 <ul>
7984
7985   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
7986     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
7987     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
7988   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
7989   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
7990     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
7991   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
7992   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
7993   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
7994     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
7995   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
7996     password submission problem
7997     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
7998
7999 </ul>
8000
8001 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
8002
8003 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
8004 <ul>
8005
8006   <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>
8007   <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>
8008   <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>
8009
8010 </ul>
8011
8012 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
8013
8014 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
8015
8016 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
8017
8018 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
8019
8020       </div>
8021       <div class="tags">
8022
8023
8024         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>.
8025
8026
8027       </div>
8028     </div>
8029     <div class="padding"></div>
8030
8031     <div class="entry">
8032       <div class="title">
8033         <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>
8034       </div>
8035       <div class="date">
8036         11th May 2013
8037       </div>
8038       <div class="body">
8039         <P>In January,
8040 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
8041 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
8042 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
8043 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
8044 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
8045 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
8046 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
8047 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
8048 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
8049 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
8050 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
8051 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
8052
8053 <p><table>
8054 <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>
8055 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
8056 <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>
8057 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
8058 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
8059 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
8060 <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>
8061 <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>
8062 <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>
8063 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
8064 </table></p>
8065
8066 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
8067 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
8068 available in experimental.</p>
8069
8070 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
8071 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
8072 for LEGO designers.</p>
8073
8074       </div>
8075       <div class="tags">
8076
8077
8078         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>.
8079
8080
8081       </div>
8082     </div>
8083     <div class="padding"></div>
8084
8085     <div class="entry">
8086       <div class="title">
8087         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
8088       </div>
8089       <div class="date">
8090          5th May 2013
8091       </div>
8092       <div class="body">
8093         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
8094 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
8095 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
8096 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
8097 soon.</p>
8098
8099 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
8100 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
8101 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
8102 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
8103 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
8104 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
8105 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
8106 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
8107 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
8108 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
8109 Edu.</a>
8110
8111 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
8112 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
8113 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
8114 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
8115 follow.<p>
8116
8117       </div>
8118       <div class="tags">
8119
8120
8121         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>.
8122
8123
8124       </div>
8125     </div>
8126     <div class="padding"></div>
8127
8128     <div class="entry">
8129       <div class="title">
8130         <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>
8131       </div>
8132       <div class="date">
8133         26th April 2013
8134       </div>
8135       <div class="body">
8136         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
8137 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
8138 announcement:</p>
8139
8140 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
8141 2013-04-26</strong></p>
8142
8143 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
8144 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
8145
8146 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
8147
8148 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
8149 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
8150 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
8151 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
8152 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
8153 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
8154 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
8155 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
8156 installed via the network.</p>
8157
8158 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
8159 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
8160 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
8161
8162 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
8163
8164 <ul>
8165 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
8166   <ul>
8167      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
8168      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
8169          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
8170          manual.)</li>
8171      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
8172      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
8173      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
8174      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
8175      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
8176      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
8177      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
8178      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
8179      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
8180      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
8181      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
8182      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
8183          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
8184          manual</a> for more details.</li>
8185      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
8186          installation.</li>
8187      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
8188          <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>
8189   </ul></li>
8190 </ul>
8191
8192 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
8193 <ul>
8194 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
8195     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
8196     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
8197 </ul>
8198
8199 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
8200 <ul>
8201 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
8202     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
8203     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
8204 </ul>
8205
8206 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
8207 <ul>
8208 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
8209     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
8210     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
8211 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
8212     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
8213     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
8214 </ul>
8215
8216 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
8217 <ul>
8218 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
8219     yet.</li>
8220 </ul>
8221
8222 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
8223
8224 <ul>
8225 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
8226     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
8227     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
8228 </ul>
8229
8230 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
8231
8232 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
8233 <ul>
8234 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
8235 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
8236 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
8237 </ul>
8238
8239 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
8240
8241 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
8242
8243 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
8244
8245 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
8246
8247       </div>
8248       <div class="tags">
8249
8250
8251         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>.
8252
8253
8254       </div>
8255     </div>
8256     <div class="padding"></div>
8257
8258     <div class="entry">
8259       <div class="title">
8260         <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>
8261       </div>
8262       <div class="date">
8263         16th April 2013
8264       </div>
8265       <div class="body">
8266         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
8267 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
8268 Details about the gathering can be found
8269 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
8270 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
8271 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
8272 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
8273 weekend.</p>
8274
8275 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
8276 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
8277 Edu release.</p>
8278
8279 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
8280
8281       </div>
8282       <div class="tags">
8283
8284
8285         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>.
8286
8287
8288       </div>
8289     </div>
8290     <div class="padding"></div>
8291
8292     <div class="entry">
8293       <div class="title">
8294         <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>
8295       </div>
8296       <div class="date">
8297          3rd April 2013
8298       </div>
8299       <div class="body">
8300         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
8301 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
8302 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
8303 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
8304
8305 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
8306 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
8307 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
8308 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
8309 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
8310 BTS. :)</p>
8311
8312       </div>
8313       <div class="tags">
8314
8315
8316         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>.
8317
8318
8319       </div>
8320     </div>
8321     <div class="padding"></div>
8322
8323     <div class="entry">
8324       <div class="title">
8325         <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>
8326       </div>
8327       <div class="date">
8328         26th March 2013
8329       </div>
8330       <div class="body">
8331         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
8332 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
8333 font you use when printing.</p>
8334
8335 <p>Three years ago,
8336 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
8337 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
8338 changed their default front from
8339 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
8340 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
8341 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
8342 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
8343 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
8344 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
8345 prints.</p>
8346
8347 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
8348 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
8349 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
8350 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
8351 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
8352 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
8353 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
8354 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
8355 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
8356 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
8357 depend on the documents printed.</p>
8358
8359 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
8360 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
8361 and save some money in the process.</p>
8362
8363 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
8364 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
8365 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
8366 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
8367 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
8368 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
8369 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
8370 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
8371 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
8372
8373       </div>
8374       <div class="tags">
8375
8376
8377         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8378
8379
8380       </div>
8381     </div>
8382     <div class="padding"></div>
8383
8384     <div class="entry">
8385       <div class="title">
8386         <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>
8387       </div>
8388       <div class="date">
8389         24th March 2013
8390       </div>
8391       <div class="body">
8392         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
8393 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
8394 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
8395 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
8396 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
8397 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
8398 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
8399 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
8400 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
8401 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
8402 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
8403 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
8404
8405 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
8406 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
8407 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
8408 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
8409 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
8410 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
8411 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
8412 all I had to do was to use the
8413 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
8414 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
8415 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
8416 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
8417 xsltproc/fop (aka
8418 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
8419 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
8420 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
8421 technical detail.</p>
8422
8423 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
8424 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
8425 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
8426 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
8427 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
8428 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
8429
8430 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
8431 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
8432 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
8433 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
8434 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
8435 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
8436 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
8437 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
8438 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
8439
8440 <p><blockquote><pre>
8441 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8442 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
8443   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
8444     &lt;hr/&gt;
8445   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8446 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8447 </pre></blockquote></p>
8448
8449 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
8450
8451 <p><blockquote><pre>
8452 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8453 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
8454   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
8455     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
8456       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
8457     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
8458   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8459 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8460 </pre></blockquote></p>
8461
8462 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
8463 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
8464 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
8465 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
8466 enough.</p>
8467
8468 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
8469 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
8470 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
8471 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
8472 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
8473 look like this:</p>
8474
8475 <p><blockquote><pre>
8476 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8477 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
8478   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
8479     &lt;br/&gt;
8480   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8481 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8482 </pre></blockquote></p>
8483
8484 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
8485
8486 <p><blockquote><pre>
8487 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8488 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
8489   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
8490   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
8491     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
8492   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8493 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8494 </pre></blockquote></p>
8495
8496 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
8497 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
8498 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
8499 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
8500 page.</p>
8501
8502 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
8503 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
8504 github</a>
8505 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
8506 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
8507 days.</p>
8508
8509       </div>
8510       <div class="tags">
8511
8512
8513         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>.
8514
8515
8516       </div>
8517     </div>
8518     <div class="padding"></div>
8519
8520     <div class="entry">
8521       <div class="title">
8522         <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>
8523       </div>
8524       <div class="date">
8525         17th March 2013
8526       </div>
8527       <div class="body">
8528         <p>Via
8529 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
8530 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
8531 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
8532 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
8533 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
8534 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
8535 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
8536
8537 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
8538 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
8539
8540 <blockquote>
8541 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
8542 </blockquote>
8543
8544 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
8545
8546 <blockquote>
8547 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
8548 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
8549 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
8550 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
8551 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
8552 </blockquote>
8553
8554 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
8555 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
8556 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
8557 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
8558
8559 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
8560 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
8561
8562 <blockquote>
8563 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
8564 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
8565 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
8566 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
8567 </blockquote>
8568
8569 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
8570 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
8571 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
8572 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
8573 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
8574
8575 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
8576 embedding:</p>
8577
8578 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
8579
8580       </div>
8581       <div class="tags">
8582
8583
8584         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>.
8585
8586
8587       </div>
8588     </div>
8589     <div class="padding"></div>
8590
8591     <div class="entry">
8592       <div class="title">
8593         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
8594       </div>
8595       <div class="date">
8596          8th March 2013
8597       </div>
8598       <div class="body">
8599         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
8600 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
8601 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
8602 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
8603 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
8604 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
8605 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
8606
8607 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
8608
8609 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
8610 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
8611
8612 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
8613 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
8614 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
8615 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
8616 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
8617 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
8618
8619 <p>Images are available for download at
8620 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
8621
8622 <p>md5sums:
8623 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
8624 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
8625 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
8626
8627 <p>sha1sums:
8628 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
8629 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
8630 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
8631
8632 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
8633
8634 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
8635 2013-03-03:</p>
8636
8637 <ul>
8638   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
8639   <ul>
8640         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
8641         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
8642   </ul></li>
8643   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
8644   <ul>
8645         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
8646         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
8647   </ul></li>
8648   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
8649      <ul>
8650         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
8651         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
8652         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
8653                 Closes: #664596</li>
8654         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
8655                 Closes: #664976</li>
8656         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
8657            <ul>
8658                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
8659                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
8660            </ul></li>
8661         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
8662            <ul>
8663                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
8664                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
8665                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
8666                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
8667                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
8668            </ul></li>
8669         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
8670     </ul>
8671   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
8672     <ul>
8673         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
8674     </ul></li>
8675 </ul>
8676
8677 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
8678 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
8679 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
8680 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
8681
8682 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
8683 mailinglist
8684 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
8685 </p></blockquote>
8686
8687 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
8688
8689       </div>
8690       <div class="tags">
8691
8692
8693         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>.
8694
8695
8696       </div>
8697     </div>
8698     <div class="padding"></div>
8699
8700     <div class="entry">
8701       <div class="title">
8702         <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>
8703       </div>
8704       <div class="date">
8705          3rd March 2013
8706       </div>
8707       <div class="body">
8708         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
8709 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
8710 support using
8711 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
8712 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
8713 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
8714 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
8715 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
8716 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
8717 using the GNU LGPL, and
8718 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
8719
8720 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
8721 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
8722 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
8723 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
8724 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
8725 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
8726
8727 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
8728 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
8729 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
8730 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
8731 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
8732 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
8733 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
8734 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
8735 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
8736 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
8737 signal distribution is handled using
8738 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
8739 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
8740 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
8741 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
8742 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
8743 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
8744 them up a bit more first.</p>
8745
8746 <p>The development is coordinated on the
8747 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
8748 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
8749 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
8750 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
8751 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
8752 development.</p>
8753
8754       </div>
8755       <div class="tags">
8756
8757
8758         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>.
8759
8760
8761       </div>
8762     </div>
8763     <div class="padding"></div>
8764
8765     <div class="entry">
8766       <div class="title">
8767         <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>
8768       </div>
8769       <div class="date">
8770         27th February 2013
8771       </div>
8772       <div class="body">
8773         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
8774 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
8775 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
8776 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
8777 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
8778 (where I am the chair of the board) and
8779 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
8780 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
8781 GNU», with this description:
8782
8783 <p><blockquote>
8784 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
8785 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
8786 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
8787 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
8788 </blockquote></p>
8789
8790 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
8791 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
8792 am really curious how many will show up.  See
8793 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
8794 page</a> for the location details.</p>
8795
8796       </div>
8797       <div class="tags">
8798
8799
8800         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>.
8801
8802
8803       </div>
8804     </div>
8805     <div class="padding"></div>
8806
8807     <div class="entry">
8808       <div class="title">
8809         <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>
8810       </div>
8811       <div class="date">
8812         15th February 2013
8813       </div>
8814       <div class="body">
8815         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
8816 now a great source of free maps available from
8817 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
8818 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
8819 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
8820 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
8821 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
8822 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
8823 page for descriptions).</p>
8824
8825 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
8826 map you can just edit the
8827 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
8828 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
8829
8830       </div>
8831       <div class="tags">
8832
8833
8834         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>.
8835
8836
8837       </div>
8838     </div>
8839     <div class="padding"></div>
8840
8841     <div class="entry">
8842       <div class="title">
8843         <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>
8844       </div>
8845       <div class="date">
8846         12th February 2013
8847       </div>
8848       <div class="body">
8849         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
8850 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
8851 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
8852 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
8853 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
8854 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
8855 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
8856 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
8857 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
8858 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
8859 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
8860 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
8861 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
8862 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
8863 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
8864 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
8865
8866 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
8867 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
8868 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
8869 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
8870 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
8871 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
8872 fields:</p>
8873
8874 <p><pre>
8875 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
8876 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
8877 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
8878 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
8879 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
8880 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
8881 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
8882 </pre></p>
8883
8884 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
8885 answer regarding
8886 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
8887 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
8888 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
8889 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
8890
8891 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
8892
8893 <p><pre>
8894 BEGIN:VCARD
8895 VERSION:2.1
8896 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
8897 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
8898 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
8899 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
8900 REV:20130212T095000Z
8901 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
8902 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
8903 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
8904 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
8905 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
8906 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
8907 END:VCARD
8908 </pre></p>
8909
8910 <p>The resulting QR code created using
8911 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
8912 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
8913 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
8914 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
8915 system.</p>
8916
8917 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
8918
8919 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
8920 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
8921 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
8922 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
8923
8924 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
8925 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
8926
8927       </div>
8928       <div class="tags">
8929
8930
8931         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>.
8932
8933
8934       </div>
8935     </div>
8936     <div class="padding"></div>
8937
8938     <div class="entry">
8939       <div class="title">
8940         <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>
8941       </div>
8942       <div class="date">
8943         10th February 2013
8944       </div>
8945       <div class="body">
8946         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
8947
8948 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
8949 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
8950 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
8951 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
8952 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
8953 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
8954 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
8955 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
8956 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
8957 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
8958 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
8959
8960 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
8961 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
8962 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
8963 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
8964 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
8965 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
8966 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
8967 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
8968 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
8969 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
8970 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
8971 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
8972 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
8973 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
8974 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
8975 ones own
8976 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
8977 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
8978 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
8979 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
8980 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
8981 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
8982 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
8983 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
8984 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
8985 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
8986 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
8987
8988 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
8989 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
8990 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
8991 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
8992 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
8993 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
8994
8995 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
8996 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
8997 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
8998
8999       </div>
9000       <div class="tags">
9001
9002
9003         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9004
9005
9006       </div>
9007     </div>
9008     <div class="padding"></div>
9009
9010     <div class="entry">
9011       <div class="title">
9012         <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>
9013       </div>
9014       <div class="date">
9015          2nd February 2013
9016       </div>
9017       <div class="body">
9018         <p>My
9019 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
9020 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
9021 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
9022 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
9023 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
9024 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
9025 version too.</p>
9026
9027 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
9028 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
9029 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
9030 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
9031 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
9032 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
9033 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
9034 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
9035
9036 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
9037 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
9038 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
9039 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
9040 it. :)</p>
9041
9042 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9043 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9044 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9045
9046       </div>
9047       <div class="tags">
9048
9049
9050         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>.
9051
9052
9053       </div>
9054     </div>
9055     <div class="padding"></div>
9056
9057     <div class="entry">
9058       <div class="title">
9059         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
9060       </div>
9061       <div class="date">
9062         22nd January 2013
9063       </div>
9064       <div class="body">
9065         <p>Yesterday, I
9066 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
9067 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
9068 pluggable hardware devices, which I
9069 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
9070 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
9071 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
9072 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
9073 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
9074 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
9075 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
9076 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
9077 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
9078 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
9079
9080 <pre>
9081 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
9082 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
9083 </pre>
9084
9085 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
9086 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
9087 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
9088 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
9089
9090 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
9091 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
9092 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
9093 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
9094 word.</p>
9095
9096 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
9097 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
9098 process.</p>
9099
9100 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
9101 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
9102
9103       </div>
9104       <div class="tags">
9105
9106
9107         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>.
9108
9109
9110       </div>
9111     </div>
9112     <div class="padding"></div>
9113
9114     <div class="entry">
9115       <div class="title">
9116         <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>
9117       </div>
9118       <div class="date">
9119         21st January 2013
9120       </div>
9121       <div class="body">
9122         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
9123 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
9124 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
9125 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
9126 it, fetch the
9127 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
9128 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
9129 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
9130 autostart script.</p>
9131
9132 <p>The design is simple:</p>
9133
9134 <ul>
9135
9136 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
9137 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
9138
9139 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
9140 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
9141 initially did.</li>
9142
9143 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
9144 the APT database, a database
9145 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
9146 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
9147
9148 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
9149 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
9150 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
9151 package or packages.</li>
9152
9153 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
9154 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
9155
9156 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
9157 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
9158
9159 </ul>
9160
9161 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
9162 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
9163 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
9164 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
9165
9166 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
9167 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
9168 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
9169 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
9170 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
9171
9172 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
9173 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
9174 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
9175 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
9176 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
9177 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
9178 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
9179 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
9180
9181 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
9182 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
9183 '<tt>svn checkout
9184 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
9185 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
9186 devscripts package.</p>
9187
9188 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
9189 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
9190 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
9191 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
9192 instructions</a> for details.</p>
9193
9194       </div>
9195       <div class="tags">
9196
9197
9198         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>.
9199
9200
9201       </div>
9202     </div>
9203     <div class="padding"></div>
9204
9205     <div class="entry">
9206       <div class="title">
9207         <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>
9208       </div>
9209       <div class="date">
9210         19th January 2013
9211       </div>
9212       <div class="body">
9213         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
9214 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
9215 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
9216 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
9217 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
9218 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
9219 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
9220 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
9221 not a durable solution.
9222
9223 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
9224 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
9225
9226 <ul>
9227
9228 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
9229   than A4).</li>
9230 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
9231 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
9232 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
9233 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
9234 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
9235 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
9236 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
9237 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
9238 size).</li>
9239 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
9240   X.org packages.</li>
9241 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
9242   the time).
9243
9244 </ul>
9245
9246 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
9247 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
9248 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
9249 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
9250 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
9251 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
9252 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
9253 still be useful.</p>
9254
9255 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
9256 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
9257 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
9258 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
9259 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
9260 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
9261
9262       </div>
9263       <div class="tags">
9264
9265
9266         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>.
9267
9268
9269       </div>
9270     </div>
9271     <div class="padding"></div>
9272
9273     <div class="entry">
9274       <div class="title">
9275         <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>
9276       </div>
9277       <div class="date">
9278         18th January 2013
9279       </div>
9280       <div class="body">
9281         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
9282 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
9283 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
9284 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
9285 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
9286 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
9287 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
9288
9289 <pre>
9290 #!/usr/bin/python
9291 import sys
9292 import apt
9293 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
9294     cache = apt.Cache()
9295     cache.open(None)
9296     thepkgs = []
9297     for pkg in cache:
9298         version = pkg.candidate
9299         if version is None:
9300             version = pkg.installed
9301         if version is None:
9302             continue
9303         record = version.record
9304         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
9305             continue
9306         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
9307         for t in mime_types:
9308             t = t.rstrip().strip()
9309             if t == mimetype:
9310                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
9311     return thepkgs
9312 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
9313 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
9314     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
9315 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
9316 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
9317     print "  %s" %pkg
9318 </pre>
9319
9320 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
9321
9322 <pre>
9323 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
9324 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
9325   gecko-mediaplayer
9326 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
9327 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
9328   browser-plugin-gnash
9329 %
9330 </pre>
9331
9332 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
9333 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
9334 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
9335 anyone working on adding it?</p>
9336
9337 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
9338 request for icweasel support for this feature is
9339 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
9340 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
9341 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
9342 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
9343
9344       </div>
9345       <div class="tags">
9346
9347
9348         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>.
9349
9350
9351       </div>
9352     </div>
9353     <div class="padding"></div>
9354
9355     <div class="entry">
9356       <div class="title">
9357         <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>
9358       </div>
9359       <div class="date">
9360         16th January 2013
9361       </div>
9362       <div class="body">
9363         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
9364 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
9365 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
9366 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
9367 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
9368 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
9369 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
9370 downloaded by the browser.</p>
9371
9372 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
9373 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
9374 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
9375 can be found on the
9376 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
9377 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
9378 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
9379 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
9380 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
9381
9382 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
9383
9384 <pre>
9385   count MIME type
9386   ----- -----------------------
9387      32 text/plain
9388      30 audio/mpeg
9389      29 image/png
9390      28 image/jpeg
9391      27 application/ogg
9392      26 audio/x-mp3
9393      25 image/tiff
9394      25 image/gif
9395      22 image/bmp
9396      22 audio/x-wav
9397      20 audio/x-flac
9398      19 audio/x-mpegurl
9399      18 video/x-ms-asf
9400      18 audio/x-musepack
9401      18 audio/x-mpeg
9402      18 application/x-ogg
9403      17 video/mpeg
9404      17 audio/x-scpls
9405      17 audio/ogg
9406      16 video/x-ms-wmv
9407 </pre>
9408
9409 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
9410
9411 <pre>
9412   count MIME type
9413   ----- -----------------------
9414      33 text/plain
9415      32 image/png
9416      32 image/jpeg
9417      29 audio/mpeg
9418      27 image/gif
9419      26 image/tiff
9420      26 application/ogg
9421      25 audio/x-mp3
9422      22 image/bmp
9423      21 audio/x-wav
9424      19 audio/x-mpegurl
9425      19 audio/x-mpeg
9426      18 video/mpeg
9427      18 audio/x-scpls
9428      18 audio/x-flac
9429      18 application/x-ogg
9430      17 video/x-ms-asf
9431      17 text/html
9432      17 audio/x-musepack
9433      16 image/x-xbitmap
9434 </pre>
9435
9436 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
9437
9438 <pre>
9439   count MIME type
9440   ----- -----------------------
9441      31 text/plain
9442      31 image/png
9443      31 image/jpeg
9444      29 audio/mpeg
9445      28 application/ogg
9446      27 image/gif
9447      26 image/tiff
9448      26 audio/x-mp3
9449      23 audio/x-wav
9450      22 image/bmp
9451      21 audio/x-flac
9452      20 audio/x-mpegurl
9453      19 audio/x-mpeg
9454      18 video/x-ms-asf
9455      18 video/mpeg
9456      18 audio/x-scpls
9457      18 application/x-ogg
9458      17 audio/x-musepack
9459      16 video/x-ms-wmv
9460      16 video/x-msvideo
9461 </pre>
9462
9463 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
9464 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
9465 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
9466 issues.</p>
9467
9468 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
9469 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
9470
9471       </div>
9472       <div class="tags">
9473
9474
9475         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>.
9476
9477
9478       </div>
9479     </div>
9480     <div class="padding"></div>
9481
9482     <div class="entry">
9483       <div class="title">
9484         <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>
9485       </div>
9486       <div class="date">
9487         15th January 2013
9488       </div>
9489       <div class="body">
9490         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
9491 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
9492 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
9493 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
9494 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
9495 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
9496 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
9497 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
9498 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
9499 packages.</p>
9500
9501 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
9502 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
9503 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
9504 modalias.</p>
9505
9506 <p><blockquote>
9507 Package: package-name
9508 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
9509 </blockquote></p>
9510
9511 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
9512 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
9513
9514 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
9515 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
9516
9517 <p><blockquote>
9518 Package: cheese
9519 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
9520 </blockquote></p>
9521
9522 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
9523 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
9524
9525 <p><blockquote>
9526 Package: pcmciautils
9527 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
9528 </blockquote></p>
9529
9530 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
9531 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
9532
9533 <p><blockquote>
9534 Package: colorhug-client
9535 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
9536 </blockquote></p>
9537
9538 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
9539 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
9540 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
9541
9542 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
9543 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
9544 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
9545 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
9546 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
9547 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
9548 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
9549 Raring.</p>
9550
9551 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
9552 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
9553 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
9554 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
9555 try the
9556 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
9557 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
9558 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
9559 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
9560
9561 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
9562 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
9563
9564 <p><blockquote>
9565 % ./hw-support-lookup
9566 <br>yubikey-personalization
9567 <br>%
9568 </blockquote></p>
9569
9570 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
9571 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
9572
9573 <p><blockquote>
9574 % ./hw-support-lookup
9575 <br>pcmciautils
9576 <br>%
9577 </blockquote></p>
9578
9579 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
9580 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
9581 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
9582
9583 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
9584 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
9585 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
9586 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
9587 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
9588 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
9589 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
9590 see if it work.</p>
9591
9592 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
9593 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
9594 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
9595 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
9596
9597       </div>
9598       <div class="tags">
9599
9600
9601         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>.
9602
9603
9604       </div>
9605     </div>
9606     <div class="padding"></div>
9607
9608     <div class="entry">
9609       <div class="title">
9610         <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>
9611       </div>
9612       <div class="date">
9613         14th January 2013
9614       </div>
9615       <div class="body">
9616         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
9617 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
9618 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
9619 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
9620 in
9621 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
9622 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
9623
9624 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
9625
9626 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
9627 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
9628 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
9629 &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;,
9630 &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
9631 &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;.
9632
9633 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
9634 this shell script:</p>
9635
9636 <pre>
9637 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
9638 </pre>
9639
9640 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
9641 using modinfo:</p>
9642
9643 <pre>
9644 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
9645 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
9646 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
9647 %
9648 </pre>
9649
9650 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
9651
9652 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
9653 Bridge memory controller:</p>
9654
9655 <p><blockquote>
9656 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
9657 </blockquote></p>
9658
9659 <p>This represent these values:</p>
9660
9661 <pre>
9662  v   00008086  (vendor)
9663  d   00002770  (device)
9664  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
9665  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
9666  bc  06        (bus class)
9667  sc  00        (bus subclass)
9668  i   00        (interface)
9669 </pre>
9670
9671 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
9672 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
9673 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
9674 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
9675
9676 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
9677 means.</p>
9678
9679 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
9680
9681 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
9682 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
9683
9684 <p><blockquote>
9685 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
9686 </blockquote></p>
9687
9688 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
9689
9690 <pre>
9691  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
9692  p    0001  (device product)
9693  d    0206  (bcddevice)
9694  dc     09  (device class)
9695  dsc    00  (device subclass)
9696  dp     00  (device protocol)
9697  ic     09  (interface class)
9698  isc    00  (interface subclass)
9699  ip     00  (interface protocol)
9700 </pre>
9701
9702 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
9703 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
9704 these alias entries show up:</p>
9705
9706 <p><blockquote>
9707 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
9708 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
9709 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
9710 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
9711 </blockquote></p>
9712
9713 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
9714 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
9715 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
9716
9717 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
9718
9719 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
9720 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
9721
9722 <p><blockquote>
9723 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
9724 </blockquote></p>
9725
9726 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
9727
9728 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
9729
9730 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
9731 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
9732 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
9733
9734 <p><blockquote>
9735 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
9736 </blockquote></p>
9737
9738 <p>The values present are</p>
9739
9740 <pre>
9741  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
9742  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
9743  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
9744  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
9745  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
9746  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
9747  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
9748  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
9749  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
9750  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
9751  ct   10             (chassis type)
9752  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
9753 </pre>
9754
9755 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
9756 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
9757
9758 <pre>
9759   3 Desktop
9760   4 Low Profile Desktop
9761   5 Pizza Box
9762   6 Mini Tower
9763   7 Tower
9764   8 Portable
9765   9 Laptop
9766  10 Notebook
9767  11 Hand Held
9768  12 Docking Station
9769  13 All In One
9770  14 Sub Notebook
9771  15 Space-saving
9772  16 Lunch Box
9773  17 Main Server Chassis
9774  18 Expansion Chassis
9775  19 Sub Chassis
9776  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
9777  21 Peripheral Chassis
9778  22 RAID Chassis
9779  23 Rack Mount Chassis
9780  24 Sealed-case PC
9781  25 Multi-system
9782  26 CompactPCI
9783  27 AdvancedTCA
9784  28 Blade
9785  29 Blade Enclosing
9786 </pre>
9787
9788 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
9789 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
9790 claim it is a desktop.</p>
9791
9792 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
9793
9794 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
9795 test machine:</p>
9796
9797 <p><blockquote>
9798 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
9799 </blockquote></p>
9800
9801 <p>The values present are</p>
9802
9803 <pre>
9804   ty  01  (type)
9805   pr  00  (prototype)
9806   id  00  (id)
9807   ex  00  (extra)
9808 </pre>
9809
9810 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
9811 the valid values are.</p>
9812
9813 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
9814
9815 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
9816 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
9817 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
9818 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
9819 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
9820 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
9821 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
9822
9823 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
9824
9825 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
9826 one can use the following shell script:</p>
9827
9828 <pre>
9829   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
9830     echo "$id" ; \
9831     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
9832   done
9833 </pre>
9834
9835 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
9836 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
9837
9838 <pre>
9839   acpi:ACPI0003:
9840     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
9841   acpi:device:
9842   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
9843   acpi:IBM0068:
9844     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
9845     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
9846     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
9847     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
9848   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
9849     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
9850     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
9851     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
9852   [...]
9853 </pre>
9854
9855 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
9856 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
9857 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
9858 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
9859
9860 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
9861 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
9862 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
9863
9864       </div>
9865       <div class="tags">
9866
9867
9868         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>.
9869
9870
9871       </div>
9872     </div>
9873     <div class="padding"></div>
9874
9875     <div class="entry">
9876       <div class="title">
9877         <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>
9878       </div>
9879       <div class="date">
9880         10th January 2013
9881       </div>
9882       <div class="body">
9883         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
9884 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
9885 Launcher and updated the Debian package
9886 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
9887 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
9888 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
9889 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
9890 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
9891 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
9892 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
9893 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
9894 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
9895 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
9896 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
9897 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
9898 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
9899 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
9900 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
9901
9902       </div>
9903       <div class="tags">
9904
9905
9906         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>.
9907
9908
9909       </div>
9910     </div>
9911     <div class="padding"></div>
9912
9913     <div class="entry">
9914       <div class="title">
9915         <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>
9916       </div>
9917       <div class="date">
9918          9th January 2013
9919       </div>
9920       <div class="body">
9921         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
9922 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
9923 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
9924 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
9925 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
9926 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
9927 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
9928 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
9929 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
9930 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
9931 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
9932
9933 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
9934 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
9935 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
9936 simple:
9937
9938 <ul>
9939
9940 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
9941   starting when a user log in.</li>
9942
9943 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
9944   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
9945
9946 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
9947   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
9948   packages.</li>
9949
9950 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
9951   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
9952
9953 </ul>
9954
9955 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
9956 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
9957 discover database to find packages and
9958 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
9959 packages.</p>
9960
9961 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
9962 draft package is now checked into
9963 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
9964 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
9965 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
9966 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
9967 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
9968 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
9969 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
9970 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
9971 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
9972 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
9973 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
9974 because of the freeze).</p>
9975
9976 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
9977 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
9978 inserted):</p>
9979
9980 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
9981
9982 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
9983 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
9984 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
9985
9986 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
9987 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
9988 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
9989 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
9990 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
9991 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
9992 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
9993
9994 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
9995 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
9996 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
9997 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
9998 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
9999 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
10000 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
10001 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
10002 not be installed?</p>
10003
10004 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
10005 please send me an email. :)</p>
10006
10007       </div>
10008       <div class="tags">
10009
10010
10011         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>.
10012
10013
10014       </div>
10015     </div>
10016     <div class="padding"></div>
10017
10018     <div class="entry">
10019       <div class="title">
10020         <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>
10021       </div>
10022       <div class="date">
10023          2nd January 2013
10024       </div>
10025       <div class="body">
10026         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
10027 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
10028 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
10029 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
10030 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
10031 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
10032 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
10033 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
10034 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
10035 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
10036
10037 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
10038 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
10039 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
10040
10041       </div>
10042       <div class="tags">
10043
10044
10045         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>.
10046
10047
10048       </div>
10049     </div>
10050     <div class="padding"></div>
10051
10052     <div class="entry">
10053       <div class="title">
10054         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
10055       </div>
10056       <div class="date">
10057         28th December 2012
10058       </div>
10059       <div class="body">
10060         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
10061 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
10062 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
10063 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
10064 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
10065 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
10066 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
10067 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
10068 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
10069 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
10070 followed by many others. :)</p>
10071
10072 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
10073 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
10074 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
10075 you want to donate to the project.</p>
10076
10077       </div>
10078       <div class="tags">
10079
10080
10081         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>.
10082
10083
10084       </div>
10085     </div>
10086     <div class="padding"></div>
10087
10088     <div class="entry">
10089       <div class="title">
10090         <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>
10091       </div>
10092       <div class="date">
10093         25th December 2012
10094       </div>
10095       <div class="body">
10096         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
10097 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
10098
10099 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
10100 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
10101 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
10102 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
10103 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
10104 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
10105 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
10106 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
10107 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
10108 name.</p>
10109
10110 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
10111 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
10112 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
10113
10114 <blockquote><pre>
10115 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
10116 cd bitcoin
10117 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
10118 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
10119 </pre></blockquote>
10120
10121 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
10122 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
10123 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
10124 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
10125 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
10126 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
10127 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
10128 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
10129 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
10130
10131 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10132 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10133 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10134
10135       </div>
10136       <div class="tags">
10137
10138
10139         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>.
10140
10141
10142       </div>
10143     </div>
10144     <div class="padding"></div>
10145
10146     <div class="entry">
10147       <div class="title">
10148         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
10149       </div>
10150       <div class="date">
10151         21st December 2012
10152       </div>
10153       <div class="body">
10154         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
10155 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
10156 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
10157 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
10158 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
10159 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
10160 is now maintained by a
10161 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
10162 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
10163 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
10164 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
10165 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
10166 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
10167 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
10168 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
10169 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
10170 Corallo in a
10171 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
10172 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
10173 Debian package.</p>
10174
10175 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
10176 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
10177 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
10178 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
10179 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
10180 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
10181 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
10182 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
10183 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
10184 new version to unstable.
10185
10186 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
10187 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
10188 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
10189 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
10190 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
10191 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
10192 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
10193 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
10194 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
10195 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
10196 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
10197 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
10198 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
10199 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
10200 have not tested them.</p>
10201
10202 <p>My
10203 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
10204 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
10205 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
10206 years ago, as can be
10207 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
10208 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
10209 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
10210 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
10211 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
10212 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
10213 the same address as last time,
10214 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10215
10216       </div>
10217       <div class="tags">
10218
10219
10220         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>.
10221
10222
10223       </div>
10224     </div>
10225     <div class="padding"></div>
10226
10227     <div class="entry">
10228       <div class="title">
10229         <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>
10230       </div>
10231       <div class="date">
10232         18th December 2012
10233       </div>
10234       <div class="body">
10235         <p>A few days ago I came across
10236 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
10237 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
10238 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
10239 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
10240 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
10241 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
10242 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
10243 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
10244 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
10245
10246 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
10247 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
10248 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
10249 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
10250
10251 <blockquote><pre>
10252 2004-05-27 Book Store
10253       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
10254       Liabilities:Visa
10255 </pre></blockquote>
10256
10257 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
10258 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
10259 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
10260 Spang</a>,
10261 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
10262 Keen</a>,
10263 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
10264 Cantino</a> and
10265 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
10266 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
10267 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
10268 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
10269 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
10270
10271 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
10272 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
10273 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
10274 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
10275 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
10276
10277 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
10278 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
10279 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
10280 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
10281 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
10282 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
10283 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
10284 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
10285 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
10286
10287       </div>
10288       <div class="tags">
10289
10290
10291         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>.
10292
10293
10294       </div>
10295     </div>
10296     <div class="padding"></div>
10297
10298     <div class="entry">
10299       <div class="title">
10300         <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>
10301       </div>
10302       <div class="date">
10303          6th December 2012
10304       </div>
10305       <div class="body">
10306         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
10307 Oslo</a>, we use the
10308 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
10309 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
10310 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
10311 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
10312 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
10313 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
10314 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
10315 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
10316 Python.</p>
10317
10318 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
10319 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
10320 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
10321 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
10322 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
10323 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
10324
10325 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
10326 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
10327 user currently logged in:</p>
10328
10329 <blockquote><pre>
10330 #!/usr/bin/env python
10331 import getpass
10332 import xmlrpclib
10333 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
10334 username = getpass.getuser()
10335 password = getpass.getpass()
10336 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
10337 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
10338 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
10339 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
10340 result = server.logout(sessionid)
10341 print result
10342 </pre></blockquote>
10343
10344 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
10345 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
10346
10347       </div>
10348       <div class="tags">
10349
10350
10351         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>.
10352
10353
10354       </div>
10355     </div>
10356     <div class="padding"></div>
10357
10358     <div class="entry">
10359       <div class="title">
10360         <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>
10361       </div>
10362       <div class="date">
10363         17th November 2012
10364       </div>
10365       <div class="body">
10366         <p>While working on a
10367 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
10368 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
10369 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
10370 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
10371 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
10372 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
10373
10374 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
10375 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
10376 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
10377 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
10378 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
10379 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
10380 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
10381 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
10382 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
10383 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
10384 arguments.</p>
10385
10386 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
10387 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
10388 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
10389 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
10390 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
10391 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
10392 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
10393 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
10394
10395 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
10396 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
10397 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
10398 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
10399 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
10400 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
10401 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
10402 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
10403 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
10404 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
10405 correct right holder.</p>
10406
10407 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
10408 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
10409 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
10410 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
10411 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
10412 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
10413 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
10414 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
10415 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
10416 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
10417 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
10418 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
10419 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
10420 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
10421
10422 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
10423 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
10424 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
10425
10426 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
10427 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
10428
10429       </div>
10430       <div class="tags">
10431
10432
10433         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>.
10434
10435
10436       </div>
10437     </div>
10438     <div class="padding"></div>
10439
10440     <div class="entry">
10441       <div class="title">
10442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
10443       </div>
10444       <div class="date">
10445         14th November 2012
10446       </div>
10447       <div class="body">
10448         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
10449 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
10450 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
10451 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
10452 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
10453 the people behind the German
10454 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
10455 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
10456 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
10457
10458 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10459
10460 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
10461 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
10462 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
10463
10464 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
10465 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
10466 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
10467 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
10468 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
10469 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
10470
10471 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
10472 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
10473 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
10474 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
10475 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
10476 relationship management and the communication processes in the
10477 project.</p>
10478
10479 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
10480 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
10481 and a yoga teacher.</p>
10482
10483 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10484 project?</strong></p>
10485
10486 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
10487
10488 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
10489 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
10490 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
10491 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
10492 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
10493 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
10494 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
10495 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
10496 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
10497 parents.</p>
10498
10499 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
10500 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
10501 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
10502 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
10503 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
10504 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
10505 Germany.</p>
10506
10507 <p>For information about our school project you can read
10508 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
10509 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
10510
10511 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10512 Edu?</strong></p>
10513
10514 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
10515 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
10516
10517 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
10518 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
10519 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
10520 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
10521 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
10522 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
10523 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
10524 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
10525 teachers, parents...</p>
10526
10527 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10528 Edu?</strong></p>
10529
10530 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
10531 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
10532
10533 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
10534 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
10535 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
10536 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
10537 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
10538
10539 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
10540 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
10541 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
10542 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
10543 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
10544 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
10545 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
10546
10547 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10548
10549 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
10550 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
10551 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
10552 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
10553
10554 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10555 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10556
10557 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
10558 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
10559 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
10560 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
10561 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
10562
10563 <ul>
10564
10565 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
10566 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
10567 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
10568
10569 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
10570 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
10571 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
10572 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
10573 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
10574 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
10575 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
10576
10577 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
10578 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
10579 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
10580 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
10581
10582 </ul>
10583
10584       </div>
10585       <div class="tags">
10586
10587
10588         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>.
10589
10590
10591       </div>
10592     </div>
10593     <div class="padding"></div>
10594
10595     <div class="entry">
10596       <div class="title">
10597         <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>
10598       </div>
10599       <div class="date">
10600          4th November 2012
10601       </div>
10602       <div class="body">
10603         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
10604 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
10605 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
10606 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
10607 see how a member of the bitcoin community
10608 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
10609 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
10610 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
10611 competition.  My thoughts go to the
10612 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
10613 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
10614 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
10615 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
10616 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
10617
10618 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
10619 that the community already seem to have
10620 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
10621 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
10622 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
10623 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
10624 wealth is available.</p>
10625
10626       </div>
10627       <div class="tags">
10628
10629
10630         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>.
10631
10632
10633       </div>
10634     </div>
10635     <div class="padding"></div>
10636
10637     <div class="entry">
10638       <div class="title">
10639         <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>
10640       </div>
10641       <div class="date">
10642         26th October 2012
10643       </div>
10644       <div class="body">
10645         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
10646 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
10647 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
10648 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
10649 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
10650 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
10651 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
10652 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
10653 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
10654 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
10655 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
10656 it every time.</p>
10657
10658 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
10659 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
10660 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
10661 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
10662 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
10663 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
10664 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
10665 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
10666 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
10667 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
10668 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
10669 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
10670
10671 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
10672 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
10673 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
10674 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
10675 article: First the unplanned outage:
10676
10677 <blockquote><pre>
10678 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
10679 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
10680 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
10681 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
10682 Duration:    40 minutes
10683 Scope:       Exchange 2003
10684 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
10685              a cluster failover.
10686
10687 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
10688              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
10689 Technician:  [xxx]
10690 </pre></blockquote>
10691
10692 Next the planned outage:
10693
10694 <blockquote><pre>
10695 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
10696 Severity:    Major (Planned)
10697 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
10698 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
10699 Duration:    10 hours
10700 Scope:       H2 Transport
10701 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
10702              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
10703              4510s.
10704 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
10705              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
10706              connectivity.
10707 Technician:  [xxx]
10708 </pre></blockquote>
10709
10710 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
10711 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
10712 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
10713 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
10714 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
10715 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
10716 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
10717
10718 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
10719 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
10720 university too.  We do register
10721 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
10722 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
10723 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
10724 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
10725 for other sites to consider too?</p>
10726
10727       </div>
10728       <div class="tags">
10729
10730
10731         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>.
10732
10733
10734       </div>
10735     </div>
10736     <div class="padding"></div>
10737
10738     <div class="entry">
10739       <div class="title">
10740         <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>
10741       </div>
10742       <div class="date">
10743         22nd October 2012
10744       </div>
10745       <div class="body">
10746         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
10747 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
10748 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
10749 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
10750 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
10751 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
10752 background information is available in Norwegian from
10753 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
10754 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
10755 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
10756 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
10757 willing to
10758 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
10759 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
10760 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
10761 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
10762 sounded like
10763 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
10764 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
10765 later.</p>
10766
10767 <p>And thought this action is
10768 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
10769 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
10770 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
10771 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
10772 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
10773 rights.</p>
10774
10775 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
10776 unacceptable terms.  For example
10777 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
10778 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
10779 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
10780 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
10781 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
10782
10783 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
10784 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
10785 restored the account of the user, as reported by
10786 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
10787 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
10788 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
10789 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
10790 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
10791 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
10792 reading two opinions from
10793 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
10794 Phipps</a> and
10795 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
10796 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
10797 details about the original story.</p>
10798
10799       </div>
10800       <div class="tags">
10801
10802
10803         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>.
10804
10805
10806       </div>
10807     </div>
10808     <div class="padding"></div>
10809
10810     <div class="entry">
10811       <div class="title">
10812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
10813       </div>
10814       <div class="date">
10815         18th October 2012
10816       </div>
10817       <div class="body">
10818         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
10819 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
10820 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
10821 across a marvellous drawing by
10822 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
10823 visualising some of what is going on.
10824
10825 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
10826 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
10827
10828 <blockquote>
10829 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
10830 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
10831 </blockquote>
10832
10833 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
10834 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
10835 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
10836 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
10837 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
10838 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
10839
10840       </div>
10841       <div class="tags">
10842
10843
10844         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>.
10845
10846
10847       </div>
10848     </div>
10849     <div class="padding"></div>
10850
10851     <div class="entry">
10852       <div class="title">
10853         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
10854       </div>
10855       <div class="date">
10856         12th October 2012
10857       </div>
10858       <div class="body">
10859         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
10860 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
10861 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
10862 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
10863 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
10864 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
10865 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
10866 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
10867 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
10868 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
10869 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
10870 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
10871 matter".</p>
10872
10873 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
10874 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
10875 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
10876 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
10877 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
10878 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
10879 to argue its side.</p>
10880
10881 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
10882 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
10883 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
10884 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
10885
10886 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
10887 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
10888 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
10889
10890       </div>
10891       <div class="tags">
10892
10893
10894         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>.
10895
10896
10897       </div>
10898     </div>
10899     <div class="padding"></div>
10900
10901     <div class="entry">
10902       <div class="title">
10903         <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>
10904       </div>
10905       <div class="date">
10906          3rd October 2012
10907       </div>
10908       <div class="body">
10909         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
10910 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
10911 the computer science book collection available in his local
10912 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
10913 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
10914 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
10915 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
10916 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
10917 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
10918 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
10919 recently published books.</p>
10920
10921 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
10922 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
10923 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
10924 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
10925 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
10926 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
10927 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
10928 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
10929 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
10930 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
10931 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
10932 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
10933 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
10934 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
10935 for the library that evening.</p>
10936
10937 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
10938 going to know that for example
10939 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
10940 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
10941 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
10942 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
10943 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
10944 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
10945 book right away.</p>
10946
10947       </div>
10948       <div class="tags">
10949
10950
10951         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10952
10953
10954       </div>
10955     </div>
10956     <div class="padding"></div>
10957
10958     <div class="entry">
10959       <div class="title">
10960         <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>
10961       </div>
10962       <div class="date">
10963         23rd September 2012
10964       </div>
10965       <div class="body">
10966         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
10967 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
10968 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10969 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
10970 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
10971 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
10972
10973 When I started, I
10974 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
10975 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
10976 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
10977 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
10978 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
10979 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
10980 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
10981
10982 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
10983
10984 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
10985 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
10986 the project files currently available from
10987 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10988
10989 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
10990 the updated
10991 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
10992 and
10993 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10994 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
10995 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
10996 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
10997
10998       </div>
10999       <div class="tags">
11000
11001
11002         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>.
11003
11004
11005       </div>
11006     </div>
11007     <div class="padding"></div>
11008
11009     <div class="entry">
11010       <div class="title">
11011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
11012       </div>
11013       <div class="date">
11014         17th September 2012
11015       </div>
11016       <div class="body">
11017         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
11018 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11019 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
11020 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
11021 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
11022 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
11023 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
11024
11025 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11026
11027 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
11028 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
11029 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
11030 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
11031 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
11032 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
11033 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
11034 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
11035 training is anyway very important</p>
11036
11037 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
11038 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
11039 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
11040 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
11041 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
11042
11043 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11044 project?</strong></p>
11045
11046 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
11047 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
11048 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
11049 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
11050 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
11051 hole.</p>
11052
11053 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11054 Edu?</strong></p>
11055
11056 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
11057 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
11058 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
11059 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
11060 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
11061 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
11062 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
11063 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
11064 hassle.</p>
11065
11066 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11067 Edu?</strong></p>
11068
11069 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
11070 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
11071 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
11072 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
11073 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
11074 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
11075 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
11076 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
11077
11078 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11079
11080 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
11081 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
11082 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
11083 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
11084 has the same...</p>
11085
11086 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
11087 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
11088 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
11089 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
11090
11091 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11092 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11093
11094 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
11095 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
11096 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
11097
11098 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
11099 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
11100 don't.</p>
11101
11102 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
11103 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
11104 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
11105 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
11106 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
11107 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
11108 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
11109
11110       </div>
11111       <div class="tags">
11112
11113
11114         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>.
11115
11116
11117       </div>
11118     </div>
11119     <div class="padding"></div>
11120
11121     <div class="entry">
11122       <div class="title">
11123         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
11124       </div>
11125       <div class="date">
11126         15th September 2012
11127       </div>
11128       <div class="body">
11129         <p>After the
11130 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
11131 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
11132 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
11133 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
11134 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
11135 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
11136 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
11137 was
11138 <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
11139 formal working group should be formed.</p>
11140
11141 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
11142 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
11143 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
11144 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
11145 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
11146 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
11147 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
11148 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
11149
11150 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
11151 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
11152 IETF.</p>
11153
11154       </div>
11155       <div class="tags">
11156
11157
11158         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>.
11159
11160
11161       </div>
11162     </div>
11163     <div class="padding"></div>
11164
11165     <div class="entry">
11166       <div class="title">
11167         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
11168       </div>
11169       <div class="date">
11170         12th September 2012
11171       </div>
11172       <div class="body">
11173         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
11174 publication of of
11175 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
11176 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
11177 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
11178 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
11179 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
11180 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
11181 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
11182 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
11183 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
11184 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
11185
11186 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
11187 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
11188 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
11189 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
11190
11191 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
11192 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
11193
11194       </div>
11195       <div class="tags">
11196
11197
11198         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>.
11199
11200
11201       </div>
11202     </div>
11203     <div class="padding"></div>
11204
11205     <div class="entry">
11206       <div class="title">
11207         <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>
11208       </div>
11209       <div class="date">
11210          7th September 2012
11211       </div>
11212       <div class="body">
11213         <p>As I
11214 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
11215 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
11216 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
11217 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
11218 repository for the project</a>.</p>
11219
11220 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
11221 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
11222 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
11223 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
11224
11225 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
11226 PostScript formats at
11227 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
11228 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
11229
11230       </div>
11231       <div class="tags">
11232
11233
11234         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>.
11235
11236
11237       </div>
11238     </div>
11239     <div class="padding"></div>
11240
11241     <div class="entry">
11242       <div class="title">
11243         <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>
11244       </div>
11245       <div class="date">
11246         23rd August 2012
11247       </div>
11248       <div class="body">
11249         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
11250 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
11251 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
11252 revisit the great site
11253 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
11254 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
11255 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
11256
11257       </div>
11258       <div class="tags">
11259
11260
11261         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>.
11262
11263
11264       </div>
11265     </div>
11266     <div class="padding"></div>
11267
11268     <div class="entry">
11269       <div class="title">
11270         <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>
11271       </div>
11272       <div class="date">
11273         17th August 2012
11274       </div>
11275       <div class="body">
11276         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
11277 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
11278 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
11279 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
11280 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
11281 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
11282 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
11283 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
11284 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
11285 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
11286 summer I
11287 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
11288 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
11289 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
11290
11291 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
11292 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
11293 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
11294 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
11295 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
11296 progress:</p>
11297
11298 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
11299
11300 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
11301 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
11302 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
11303 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
11304 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
11305 english version of the docbook source.</p>
11306
11307 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
11308 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
11309 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
11310 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
11311 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
11312 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
11313 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
11314 project files currently available from <a
11315 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11316
11317 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
11318 the updated
11319 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
11320 and
11321 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
11322 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
11323 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
11324 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
11325
11326       </div>
11327       <div class="tags">
11328
11329
11330         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>.
11331
11332
11333       </div>
11334     </div>
11335     <div class="padding"></div>
11336
11337     <div class="entry">
11338       <div class="title">
11339         <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>
11340       </div>
11341       <div class="date">
11342         10th August 2012
11343       </div>
11344       <div class="body">
11345         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
11346 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
11347 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
11348 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
11349 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
11350 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
11351 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
11352 case for the language
11353 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
11354 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
11355
11356 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
11357 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
11358 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
11359 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
11360 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
11361
11362 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
11363 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
11364 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
11365 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
11366 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
11367 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
11368 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
11369 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
11370 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
11371 alias for 'nb'.</p>
11372
11373 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
11374 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
11375 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
11376 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
11377 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
11378 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
11379 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
11380 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
11381 at the same time. :(</p>
11382
11383 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
11384 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
11385 processors. :(</p>
11386
11387 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
11388
11389       </div>
11390       <div class="tags">
11391
11392
11393         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>.
11394
11395
11396       </div>
11397     </div>
11398     <div class="padding"></div>
11399
11400     <div class="entry">
11401       <div class="title">
11402         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
11403       </div>
11404       <div class="date">
11405         31st July 2012
11406       </div>
11407       <div class="body">
11408         <p>I tried to send this text to the
11409 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
11410 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
11411 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
11412 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
11413 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
11414 out.</p>
11415
11416 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
11417 learning curve at the moment.</p>
11418
11419 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
11420 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
11421 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
11422 available from
11423 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
11424 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
11425 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
11426 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
11427 Squeeze.</p>
11428
11429 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
11430 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
11431 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
11432 problems.</p>
11433
11434 <ul>
11435
11436 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
11437    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
11438    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
11439    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
11440    index references spanning several pages (See
11441    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
11442    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
11443    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
11444
11445 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
11446    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
11447    #683163</a>).</li>
11448
11449 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
11450    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
11451    footnote and text body, see
11452    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
11453    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
11454    refs listed are not right).</li>
11455
11456 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
11457
11458 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
11459    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
11460
11461 </ul>
11462
11463 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
11464 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
11465 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
11466
11467 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
11468
11469       </div>
11470       <div class="tags">
11471
11472
11473         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>.
11474
11475
11476       </div>
11477     </div>
11478     <div class="padding"></div>
11479
11480     <div class="entry">
11481       <div class="title">
11482         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
11483       </div>
11484       <div class="date">
11485         21st July 2012
11486       </div>
11487       <div class="body">
11488         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
11489 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
11490 norwegian version</a> of the book
11491 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
11492 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
11493 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
11494 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
11495 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11496
11497 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
11498 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
11499 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
11500 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
11501 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
11502 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
11503 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
11504 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
11505 print. :)</p>
11506
11507 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
11508 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
11509 language.</p>
11510
11511       </div>
11512       <div class="tags">
11513
11514
11515         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>.
11516
11517
11518       </div>
11519     </div>
11520     <div class="padding"></div>
11521
11522     <div class="entry">
11523       <div class="title">
11524         <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>
11525       </div>
11526       <div class="date">
11527         16th July 2012
11528       </div>
11529       <div class="body">
11530         <p>I am currently working on a
11531 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
11532 to translate</a> the book
11533 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
11534 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
11535 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
11536 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
11537 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
11538 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
11539 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11540
11541 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
11542 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
11543 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
11544 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
11545 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
11546 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
11547 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
11548 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
11549 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
11550
11551       </div>
11552       <div class="tags">
11553
11554
11555         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>.
11556
11557
11558       </div>
11559     </div>
11560     <div class="padding"></div>
11561
11562     <div class="entry">
11563       <div class="title">
11564         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
11565       </div>
11566       <div class="date">
11567          9th July 2012
11568       </div>
11569       <div class="body">
11570         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11571 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
11572 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
11573 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
11574 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
11575 to adjust and scale the just released
11576 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11577 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
11578 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
11579
11580 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11581
11582 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
11583 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
11584 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
11585 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
11586 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
11587 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
11588 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
11589 perspective when working with IT.</p>
11590
11591 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11592 project?</strong></p>
11593
11594 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
11595 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
11596 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
11597 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
11598 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
11599 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
11600
11601 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11602 Edu?</strong></p>
11603
11604 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
11605 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
11606 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
11607 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
11608 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
11609 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
11610 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
11611 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
11612 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
11613 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
11614 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
11615 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
11616 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
11617 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
11618 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
11619 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
11620 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
11621 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
11622 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
11623 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
11624 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
11625 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
11626 quicker to update.
11627
11628 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11629 Edu?</strong></p>
11630
11631 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
11632 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
11633 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
11634 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
11635 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
11636 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
11637
11638 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
11639 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
11640 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
11641 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
11642 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
11643 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
11644 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
11645 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
11646 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
11647 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
11648 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
11649 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
11650 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
11651 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
11652 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
11653
11654 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
11655 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
11656 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
11657 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
11658 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
11659 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
11660 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
11661 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
11662
11663 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
11664 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
11665 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
11666 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
11667 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
11668 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
11669 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
11670 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
11671 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
11672 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
11673 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
11674 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
11675 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
11676 sound file.</p>
11677
11678 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
11679 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
11680 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
11681 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
11682 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
11683 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
11684 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
11685 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
11686 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
11687
11688 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11689
11690 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
11691 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
11692 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
11693 )</p>
11694
11695 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11696 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11697
11698 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
11699 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
11700 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
11701 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
11702 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
11703 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
11704 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
11705 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
11706 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
11707 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
11708 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
11709 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
11710 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
11711 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
11712 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
11713
11714 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
11715 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
11716 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
11717 management with Airtime</a>,
11718 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
11719 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
11720 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
11721 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
11722 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
11723
11724       </div>
11725       <div class="tags">
11726
11727
11728         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>.
11729
11730
11731       </div>
11732     </div>
11733     <div class="padding"></div>
11734
11735     <div class="entry">
11736       <div class="title">
11737         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
11738       </div>
11739       <div class="date">
11740          8th July 2012
11741       </div>
11742       <div class="body">
11743         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
11744 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
11745 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
11746 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
11747 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
11748 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
11749 Steinberg in his blog post
11750 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
11751 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
11752 spending of your tax money.</p>
11753
11754 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
11755 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
11756 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
11757 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
11758 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
11759 purchases.</p>
11760
11761       </div>
11762       <div class="tags">
11763
11764
11765         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>.
11766
11767
11768       </div>
11769     </div>
11770     <div class="padding"></div>
11771
11772     <div class="entry">
11773       <div class="title">
11774         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
11775       </div>
11776       <div class="date">
11777          7th July 2012
11778       </div>
11779       <div class="body">
11780         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11781 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
11782 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
11783 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
11784 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
11785 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
11786 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
11787 receive.  The software is
11788
11789 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
11790 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
11791 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
11792 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
11793 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
11794 Windows</a>.</p>
11795
11796 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
11797 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
11798
11799 <p><ul>
11800
11801   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
11802     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
11803
11804   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
11805     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
11806     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
11807     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
11808     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
11809     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
11810     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
11811     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
11812     </li>
11813
11814   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
11815     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
11816
11817   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
11818     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
11819
11820   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
11821     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
11822
11823   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
11824
11825   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
11826     formats </li>
11827
11828   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
11829     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
11830     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
11831     (as separate sets)</li>
11832
11833   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
11834     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
11835     percentage)</li>
11836
11837   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
11838     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
11839     memory):
11840     <ul>
11841       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
11842       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
11843       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
11844       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
11845       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
11846       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
11847       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
11848       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
11849       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
11850       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
11851           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
11852           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
11853           activity)</li>
11854       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
11855       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
11856     </ul></li>
11857
11858   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
11859     <ul>
11860       <li>Break periods</li>
11861       <li>For teacher(s):
11862         <ul>
11863           <li>Not available periods</li>
11864           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
11865           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
11866           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
11867           <li>Min hours daily</li>
11868           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
11869
11870           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
11871             days per week</li>
11872         </ul></li>
11873       <li>For students (sets):
11874         <ul>
11875           <li>Not available periods</li>
11876           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
11877           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
11878           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
11879           <li>Min hours daily</li>
11880           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
11881
11882           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
11883             days per week</li>
11884         </ul></li>
11885       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
11886         <ul>
11887           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
11888           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
11889           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
11890           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
11891           <li>End(s) students day</li>
11892           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
11893           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
11894             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
11895           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
11896           <li>Not overlapping</li>
11897           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
11898           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
11899         </ul></li>
11900     </ul></li>
11901
11902   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
11903     <ul>
11904       <li>Room not available periods</li>
11905       <li>For teacher(s):
11906         <ul>
11907           <li>Home room(s)</li>
11908           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
11909           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
11910         </ul>
11911       </li>
11912
11913       <li>For students (sets):
11914         <ul>
11915           <li>Home room(s)</li>
11916           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
11917           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
11918         </ul>
11919       </li>
11920       <li>Preferred room(s):
11921         <ul>
11922           <li>For a subject</li>
11923           <li>For an activity tag</li>
11924           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
11925           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
11926         </ul>
11927       </li>
11928
11929       <li>For a set of activities:
11930         <ul>
11931           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
11932         </ul>
11933       </li>
11934     </ul>
11935   </li>
11936 </ul></p>
11937
11938 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
11939 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
11940 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
11941 manually, check it out.
11942
11943 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
11944 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
11945 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
11946 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
11947 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
11948 section</a>.</p>
11949
11950       </div>
11951       <div class="tags">
11952
11953
11954         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>.
11955
11956
11957       </div>
11958     </div>
11959     <div class="padding"></div>
11960
11961     <div class="entry">
11962       <div class="title">
11963         <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>
11964       </div>
11965       <div class="date">
11966          3rd July 2012
11967       </div>
11968       <div class="body">
11969         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
11970 project (Norwegian version of
11971 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
11972 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
11973 a problem with the municipalities using
11974 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
11975 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
11976 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
11977 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
11978 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
11979 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
11980 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
11981 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
11982 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
11983 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
11984 the From: header.</p>
11985
11986 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
11987 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
11988 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
11989 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
11990 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
11991 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
11992 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
11993 behaviour.</p>
11994
11995 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
11996 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
11997 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
11998 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
11999 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
12000 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
12001 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
12002
12003       </div>
12004       <div class="tags">
12005
12006
12007         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>.
12008
12009
12010       </div>
12011     </div>
12012     <div class="padding"></div>
12013
12014     <div class="entry">
12015       <div class="title">
12016         <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>
12017       </div>
12018       <div class="date">
12019         26th June 2012
12020       </div>
12021       <div class="body">
12022         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
12023 another interview with the people behind
12024 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
12025 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
12026 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
12027 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
12028 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
12029 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
12030 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
12031
12032 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12033
12034 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
12035 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
12036 ICT in schools</p>
12037
12038 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12039 project?</strong></p>
12040
12041 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
12042 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
12043 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
12044 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
12045
12046 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12047 Edu?</strong></p>
12048
12049 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
12050 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
12051 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
12052 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
12053
12054 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12055 Edu?</strong></p>
12056
12057 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
12058 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
12059 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
12060 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
12061 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
12062 technologies in school.</p>
12063
12064 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12065
12066 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
12067 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
12068 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
12069
12070 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12071 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12072
12073 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
12074 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
12075 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
12076 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
12077
12078 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
12079 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
12080 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
12081
12082 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
12083 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
12084 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
12085 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
12086 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
12087 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
12088 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
12089 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
12090 working there.</p>
12091
12092       </div>
12093       <div class="tags">
12094
12095
12096         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>.
12097
12098
12099       </div>
12100     </div>
12101     <div class="padding"></div>
12102
12103     <div class="entry">
12104       <div class="title">
12105         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
12106       </div>
12107       <div class="date">
12108         24th June 2012
12109       </div>
12110       <div class="body">
12111         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
12112 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
12113 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
12114 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
12115 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
12116 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
12117 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
12118 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
12119 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
12120 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
12121 missing in my book.</p>
12122
12123 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
12124 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
12125 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
12126 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
12127 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
12128 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
12129 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
12130
12131       </div>
12132       <div class="tags">
12133
12134
12135         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>.
12136
12137
12138       </div>
12139     </div>
12140     <div class="padding"></div>
12141
12142     <div class="entry">
12143       <div class="title">
12144         <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>
12145       </div>
12146       <div class="date">
12147         11th June 2012
12148       </div>
12149       <div class="body">
12150         <p>During my work on
12151 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
12152 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
12153 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
12154 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
12155 explanation.</p>
12156
12157 <p><ul>
12158
12159 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
12160 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
12161 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
12162 system depend on tasksel tasks in
12163 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
12164 installation.</li>
12165
12166 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
12167 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
12168 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
12169 at least try to enable it for these services:
12170 <ul>
12171
12172   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
12173     quotas.</li>
12174   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
12175   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
12176   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
12177   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
12178   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
12179
12180 </ul></li>
12181
12182 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
12183 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
12184 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
12185 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
12186
12187 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
12188 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
12189 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
12190
12191 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
12192 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
12193 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
12194 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
12195 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
12196 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
12197
12198 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
12199 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
12200 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
12201 in Wheezy.
12202
12203 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
12204 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
12205 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
12206
12207 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
12208 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
12209 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
12210 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
12211
12212 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
12213 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
12214 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
12215 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
12216
12217 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
12218 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
12219 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
12220
12221 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
12222 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
12223 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
12224
12225 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
12226 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
12227 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
12228 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
12229 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
12230
12231 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
12232 <ul>
12233
12234 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
12235 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
12236 <li>and probably more?</li>
12237 </ul></li>
12238
12239 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
12240 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
12241 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
12242 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
12243 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
12244 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
12245 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
12246 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
12247
12248
12249 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
12250 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
12251 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
12252 use.</li>
12253
12254 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
12255 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
12256 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
12257 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
12258 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
12259
12260 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
12261 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
12262 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
12263 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
12264 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
12265 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
12266
12267 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
12268 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
12269 There are at least three implementations,
12270 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
12271 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
12272 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
12273 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
12274 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
12275 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
12276 given room.</li>
12277
12278 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
12279 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
12280 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
12281 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
12282 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
12283 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
12284 investigated.</li>
12285
12286 </ul></p>
12287
12288 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
12289 version.</p>
12290
12291       </div>
12292       <div class="tags">
12293
12294
12295         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>.
12296
12297
12298       </div>
12299     </div>
12300     <div class="padding"></div>
12301
12302     <div class="entry">
12303       <div class="title">
12304         <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>
12305       </div>
12306       <div class="date">
12307          9th June 2012
12308       </div>
12309       <div class="body">
12310         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
12311 <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
12312 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
12313 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
12314 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
12315 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
12316 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
12317 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
12318 be willing to pay for.</p>
12319
12320 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
12321 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
12322 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
12323 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
12324 Orwell</a>.</p>
12325
12326       </div>
12327       <div class="tags">
12328
12329
12330         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>.
12331
12332
12333       </div>
12334     </div>
12335     <div class="padding"></div>
12336
12337     <div class="entry">
12338       <div class="title">
12339         <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>
12340       </div>
12341       <div class="date">
12342          6th June 2012
12343       </div>
12344       <div class="body">
12345         <p>A few days ago
12346 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
12347 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
12348 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
12349 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
12350 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
12351 code for HP, Dell and IBM
12352 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
12353 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
12354 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
12355 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
12356 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
12357
12358 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
12359 output:
12360
12361 <blockquote><pre>
12362 % 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>
12363 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": ""})
12364 %
12365 </pre></blockquote>
12366
12367 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
12368 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
12369 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
12370
12371       </div>
12372       <div class="tags">
12373
12374
12375         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>.
12376
12377
12378       </div>
12379     </div>
12380     <div class="padding"></div>
12381
12382     <div class="entry">
12383       <div class="title">
12384         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
12385       </div>
12386       <div class="date">
12387          2nd June 2012
12388       </div>
12389       <div class="body">
12390         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
12391 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12392 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
12393 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
12394 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
12395 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
12396
12397 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12398
12399 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
12400 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
12401 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
12402 by Angela).</p>
12403
12404 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
12405 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
12406 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
12407 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
12408 becoming an osteopath.</p>
12409
12410 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
12411 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
12412 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
12413 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
12414 skills with communication skills.</p>
12415
12416 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12417 project?</strong></p>
12418
12419 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
12420 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
12421 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
12422 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
12423 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
12424
12425 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
12426 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
12427 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
12428 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
12429 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
12430 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
12431 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
12432 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
12433 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
12434
12435 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
12436 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
12437 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
12438
12439 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
12440
12441 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
12442 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
12443 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
12444 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
12445 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
12446 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
12447 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
12448 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
12449 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
12450 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
12451 point.</p>
12452
12453 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
12454 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
12455 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
12456 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
12457 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
12458 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
12459
12460 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
12461 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
12462 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
12463 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
12464 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
12465 spare time.</p>
12466
12467 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
12468 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
12469 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
12470 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
12471 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
12472
12473 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
12474 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
12475 avoidance do exist.</p>
12476
12477 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
12478 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
12479 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
12480 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
12481 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
12482 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
12483 and probably a gain for all.</p>
12484
12485 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12486 Edu?</strong></p>
12487
12488 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
12489 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
12490 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
12491 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
12492 project communication, honest communication within the group of
12493 developers, etc.</p>
12494
12495 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12496 Edu?</strong></p>
12497
12498 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
12499
12500 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
12501 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
12502 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
12503 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
12504 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
12505 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
12506 contribute).</p>
12507
12508 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
12509 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
12510 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
12511 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
12512 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
12513 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
12514 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
12515 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
12516 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
12517 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
12518
12519 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12520
12521 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
12522
12523 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
12524 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
12525 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
12526
12527 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
12528 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
12529 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
12530 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
12531
12532 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
12533 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
12534 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
12535 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
12536 whiteboard.</p>
12537
12538 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
12539
12540 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12541 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12542
12543 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
12544 enrol people.</p>
12545
12546       </div>
12547       <div class="tags">
12548
12549
12550         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>.
12551
12552
12553       </div>
12554     </div>
12555     <div class="padding"></div>
12556
12557     <div class="entry">
12558       <div class="title">
12559         <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>
12560       </div>
12561       <div class="date">
12562          1st June 2012
12563       </div>
12564       <div class="body">
12565         <p>A few years ago I wrote
12566 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
12567 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
12568 I have learned from colleges here at the
12569 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
12570 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
12571 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
12572 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
12573 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
12574
12575 <p><pre>
12576 use strict;
12577 use warnings;
12578 use SOAP::Lite;
12579 use Data::Dumper;
12580 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
12581 my $App = 'test';
12582 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
12583 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
12584 my $s = SOAP::Lite
12585     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
12586     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
12587     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
12588     ;
12589 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
12590     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
12591     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
12592     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
12593 );
12594 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
12595 </pre></p>
12596
12597 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
12598
12599 <p><pre>
12600 $VAR1 = {
12601           'Asset' => {
12602                      'Entitlements' => {
12603                                        'EntitlementData' => [
12604                                                             {
12605                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
12606                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
12607                                                               'Provider' => '',
12608                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
12609                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
12610                                                             },
12611                                                             {
12612                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
12613                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
12614                                                               'Provider' => '',
12615                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
12616                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
12617                                                             },
12618                                                             {
12619                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
12620                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
12621                                                               'Provider' => '',
12622                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
12623                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
12624                                                             }
12625                                                           ]
12626                                      },
12627                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
12628                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
12629                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
12630                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
12631                                           'Buid' => '2323',
12632                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
12633                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
12634                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
12635                                         }
12636                    }
12637         };
12638 </pre></p>
12639
12640 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
12641 service outside the
12642 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
12643 documentation</a>, and according to
12644 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
12645 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
12646 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
12647
12648 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
12649 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
12650
12651       </div>
12652       <div class="tags">
12653
12654
12655         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>.
12656
12657
12658       </div>
12659     </div>
12660     <div class="padding"></div>
12661
12662     <div class="entry">
12663       <div class="title">
12664         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
12665       </div>
12666       <div class="date">
12667         31st May 2012
12668       </div>
12669       <div class="body">
12670         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
12671 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
12672 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
12673 running Debian Squeeze, where
12674 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
12675 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
12676 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
12677 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
12678 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
12679 another day.</p>
12680
12681 <p>After calibration, I get a
12682 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
12683 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
12684 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
12685 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
12686 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
12687 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
12688 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
12689 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
12690 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
12691 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
12692 and a simple</p>
12693
12694 <p><pre>
12695 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
12696 </pre></p>
12697
12698 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
12699 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
12700 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
12701 enough for now.</p>
12702
12703       </div>
12704       <div class="tags">
12705
12706
12707         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12708
12709
12710       </div>
12711     </div>
12712     <div class="padding"></div>
12713
12714     <div class="entry">
12715       <div class="title">
12716         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
12717       </div>
12718       <div class="date">
12719         27th May 2012
12720       </div>
12721       <div class="body">
12722         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
12723 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12724 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
12725 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
12726 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
12727 since then, helping to make sure the
12728 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
12729 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
12730
12731 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12732
12733 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
12734 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
12735 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
12736 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
12737 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
12738 our computer network.</p>
12739
12740 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
12741 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
12742 (4 months).</p>
12743
12744 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12745 project?</strong></p>
12746
12747 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
12748 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
12749 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
12750 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
12751 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
12752 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
12753 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
12754 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
12755 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
12756 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
12757 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
12758 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
12759 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
12760 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
12761
12762 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12763 Edu?</strong></p>
12764
12765 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
12766 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
12767 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
12768 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
12769 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
12770 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
12771 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
12772 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
12773
12774 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12775 Edu?</strong></p>
12776
12777 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
12778 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
12779 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
12780 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
12781 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
12782 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
12783 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
12784 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
12785 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
12786 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
12787 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
12788 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
12789
12790 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12791
12792 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
12793 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
12794 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
12795
12796 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12797 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12798
12799 <p><ol>
12800
12801 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
12802 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
12803 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
12804 developing.</li>
12805
12806 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
12807 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
12808 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
12809 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
12810 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
12811
12812 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
12813 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
12814 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
12815
12816 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
12817 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
12818 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
12819 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
12820
12821 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
12822 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
12823 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
12824
12825 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
12826
12827 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
12828 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
12829 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
12830 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
12831
12832 </ol></p>
12833
12834       </div>
12835       <div class="tags">
12836
12837
12838         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>.
12839
12840
12841       </div>
12842     </div>
12843     <div class="padding"></div>
12844
12845     <div class="entry">
12846       <div class="title">
12847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
12848       </div>
12849       <div class="date">
12850         26th May 2012
12851       </div>
12852       <div class="body">
12853         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
12854 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
12855 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
12856 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
12857 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
12858
12859 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
12860 <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>
12861 comment:</p>
12862
12863 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
12864 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
12865 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
12866 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
12867 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
12868 </blockquote></p>
12869
12870 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
12871 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
12872 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
12873 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
12874 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
12875 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
12876 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
12877 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
12878 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
12879 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
12880 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
12881 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
12882 of wasted effort.</p>
12883
12884 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
12885 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
12886 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
12887
12888 <p>See
12889 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
12890 and
12891 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
12892 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
12893 </blockquote></p>
12894
12895       </div>
12896       <div class="tags">
12897
12898
12899         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>.
12900
12901
12902       </div>
12903     </div>
12904     <div class="padding"></div>
12905
12906     <div class="entry">
12907       <div class="title">
12908         <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>
12909       </div>
12910       <div class="date">
12911         18th May 2012
12912       </div>
12913       <div class="body">
12914         <p>In january, I
12915 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
12916 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
12917 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
12918 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
12919 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
12920 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
12921 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
12922 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
12923 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
12924 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
12925
12926 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
12927 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
12928 drivers. :)</p>
12929
12930       </div>
12931       <div class="tags">
12932
12933
12934         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12935
12936
12937       </div>
12938     </div>
12939     <div class="padding"></div>
12940
12941     <div class="entry">
12942       <div class="title">
12943         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
12944       </div>
12945       <div class="date">
12946         13th May 2012
12947       </div>
12948       <div class="body">
12949         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
12950 publish another interview with the people behind
12951 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
12952 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
12953 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
12954 details get right before release.
12955
12956 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12957
12958 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
12959 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
12960 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
12961 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
12962 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
12963 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
12964 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
12965 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
12966
12967 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
12968 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
12969 home since 2006.</p>
12970
12971 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12972 project?</strong></p>
12973
12974 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
12975 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
12976 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
12977 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
12978 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
12979 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
12980
12981 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
12982 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
12983 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
12984 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
12985 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
12986 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
12987 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
12988 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
12989 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
12990 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
12991 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
12992 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
12993 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
12994 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
12995 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
12996 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
12997
12998 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12999 Edu?</strong></p>
13000
13001 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
13002 for me as today.</p>
13003
13004 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
13005
13006 <p><ul>
13007
13008 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
13009 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
13010
13011 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
13012 cost.</li>
13013
13014 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
13015 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
13016 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
13017 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
13018 server</li>
13019
13020 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
13021 school.</li>
13022
13023 </ul></p>
13024
13025 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
13026 came up in this way:</p>
13027
13028 <p><ul>
13029
13030 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
13031 now.</li>
13032
13033 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
13034 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
13035 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
13036
13037 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
13038 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
13039 interfaces used in the past.</li>
13040
13041 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
13042 different needs.</li>
13043
13044 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
13045
13046 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
13047 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
13048 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
13049
13050 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
13051 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
13052
13053 </ul></p>
13054
13055 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13056 Edu?</strong></p>
13057
13058 <p><ul>
13059
13060 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
13061 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
13062 whole municipality areas.</li>
13063
13064 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
13065 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
13066 politicians.</li>
13067
13068 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
13069
13070 </ul></p>
13071
13072 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13073
13074 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
13075 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
13076 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
13077 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
13078 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
13079 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
13080
13081 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
13082 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
13083 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
13084 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
13085 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
13086
13087 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13088 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13089
13090 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
13091 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
13092 countries and areas all over the world.</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</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/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html">Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</a>
13108       </div>
13109       <div class="date">
13110         30th April 2012
13111       </div>
13112       <div class="body">
13113         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
13114 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
13115
13116 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
13117 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
13118 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
13119 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
13120 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
13121 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
13122 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
13123 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
13124 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
13125 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
13126 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
13127 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
13128 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
13129 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
13130 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
13131 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
13132
13133 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
13134 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
13135 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
13136 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
13137 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
13138 finally found a Danish supplier
13139 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
13140 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
13141 days ago.</p>
13142
13143 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
13144 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
13145 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
13146 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
13147 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
13148 toys.</p>
13149
13150       </div>
13151       <div class="tags">
13152
13153
13154         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13155
13156
13157       </div>
13158     </div>
13159     <div class="padding"></div>
13160
13161     <div class="entry">
13162       <div class="title">
13163         <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>
13164       </div>
13165       <div class="date">
13166         26th April 2012
13167       </div>
13168       <div class="body">
13169         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
13170 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
13171 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
13172 that the video editor application included with
13173 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
13174 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
13175 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
13176
13177 <p><blockquote>
13178 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
13179 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
13180 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
13181 </blockquote></p>
13182
13183 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
13184
13185 <p><blockquote>
13186 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
13187 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
13188 </blockquote></p>
13189
13190 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
13191 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
13192 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
13193 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
13194 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
13195 video.  AMR is
13196 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
13197 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
13198 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
13199 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
13200 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
13201 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
13202 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
13203
13204 <p>I know why I prefer
13205 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
13206 standards</a> also for video.</p>
13207
13208       </div>
13209       <div class="tags">
13210
13211
13212         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>.
13213
13214
13215       </div>
13216     </div>
13217     <div class="padding"></div>
13218
13219     <div class="entry">
13220       <div class="title">
13221         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
13222       </div>
13223       <div class="date">
13224         19th April 2012
13225       </div>
13226       <div class="body">
13227         <p>Here in Norway, the
13228 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
13229 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
13230 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
13231 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
13232 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
13233 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
13234 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
13235 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
13236 on the same level.</p>
13237
13238 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
13239 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
13240 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
13241 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
13242 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
13243 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
13244 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
13245 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
13246 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
13247 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
13248 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
13249 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
13250 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
13251 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
13252 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
13253 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
13254 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
13255 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
13256
13257 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
13258 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
13259 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
13260 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
13261 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
13262 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
13263 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
13264 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
13265
13266 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
13267 from Simon Phipps
13268 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
13269 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
13270
13271 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
13272 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
13273 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
13274 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
13275 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
13276 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
13277 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
13278 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
13279 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
13280
13281       </div>
13282       <div class="tags">
13283
13284
13285         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>.
13286
13287
13288       </div>
13289     </div>
13290     <div class="padding"></div>
13291
13292     <div class="entry">
13293       <div class="title">
13294         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
13295       </div>
13296       <div class="date">
13297         15th April 2012
13298       </div>
13299       <div class="body">
13300         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13301 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
13302 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
13303 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
13304 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
13305 up in the recently released
13306 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
13307 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
13308
13309 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13310
13311 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
13312 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
13313 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
13314 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
13315 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
13316 information technology and science/technology.</p>
13317
13318 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13319 project?</strong></p>
13320
13321 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
13322 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
13323 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
13324 contributing.</p>
13325
13326 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13327 Edu?</strong></p>
13328
13329 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
13330 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
13331 Debian Project!</p>
13332
13333 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13334 Edu?</strong></p>
13335
13336 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
13337 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
13338 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
13339 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
13340 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
13341 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
13342 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
13343
13344 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
13345 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
13346
13347 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13348
13349 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
13350 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
13351 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
13352 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
13353
13354 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13355 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13356
13357 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
13358 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
13359 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
13360 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
13361 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
13362 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
13363 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
13364
13365 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
13366 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
13367 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
13368 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
13369 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
13370 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
13371 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
13372 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
13373
13374       </div>
13375       <div class="tags">
13376
13377
13378         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>.
13379
13380
13381       </div>
13382     </div>
13383     <div class="padding"></div>
13384
13385     <div class="entry">
13386       <div class="title">
13387         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
13388       </div>
13389       <div class="date">
13390          8th April 2012
13391       </div>
13392       <div class="body">
13393         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
13394 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
13395 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
13396 contributor to the
13397 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
13398 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
13399
13400 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13401
13402 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
13403 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
13404
13405 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13406 project?</strong></p>
13407
13408 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
13409 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
13410 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
13411 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
13412 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
13413 "localisation".</p>
13414
13415 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13416 Edu?</strong></p>
13417
13418 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13419 Edu?</strong></p>
13420
13421 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
13422 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
13423 education system.</p>
13424
13425 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
13426 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
13427 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
13428 money on the latest hardware.</p>
13429
13430 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13431
13432 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
13433 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
13434 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
13435
13436 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13437 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13438
13439 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
13440 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
13441 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
13442
13443       </div>
13444       <div class="tags">
13445
13446
13447         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>.
13448
13449
13450       </div>
13451     </div>
13452     <div class="padding"></div>
13453
13454     <div class="entry">
13455       <div class="title">
13456         <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>
13457       </div>
13458       <div class="date">
13459          6th April 2012
13460       </div>
13461       <div class="body">
13462         <p>Recently I have spent time with
13463 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
13464 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13465 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
13466 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
13467 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
13468 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
13469 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
13470 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
13471
13472 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
13473 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
13474 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
13475 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
13476 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
13477 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
13478 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
13479 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
13480
13481 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
13482 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
13483 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
13484 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
13485 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
13486 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
13487 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
13488 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
13489
13490 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
13491 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
13492 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
13493 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
13494 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
13495 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
13496 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
13497 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
13498 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
13499 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
13500
13501 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
13502 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
13503 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
13504 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
13505
13506 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
13507 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
13508
13509       </div>
13510       <div class="tags">
13511
13512
13513         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>.
13514
13515
13516       </div>
13517     </div>
13518     <div class="padding"></div>
13519
13520     <div class="entry">
13521       <div class="title">
13522         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
13523       </div>
13524       <div class="date">
13525          5th April 2012
13526       </div>
13527       <div class="body">
13528         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
13529 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
13530 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
13531 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
13532 for schools.  Check out his article
13533 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
13534 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
13535
13536       </div>
13537       <div class="tags">
13538
13539
13540         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>.
13541
13542
13543       </div>
13544     </div>
13545     <div class="padding"></div>
13546
13547     <div class="entry">
13548       <div class="title">
13549         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
13550       </div>
13551       <div class="date">
13552          1st April 2012
13553       </div>
13554       <div class="body">
13555         <p>Germany is a core area for the
13556 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13557 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
13558 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
13559
13560 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13561
13562 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
13563 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
13564 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
13565 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
13566 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
13567 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
13568 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
13569 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
13570
13571 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
13572 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
13573 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
13574 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
13575 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
13576 the end of April this year.</p>
13577
13578 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13579 project?</strong></p>
13580
13581 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
13582 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
13583 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
13584 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
13585 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
13586 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
13587 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
13588 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
13589 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
13590 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
13591 Skolelinux.</p>
13592
13593 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
13594 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
13595 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
13596 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
13597 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
13598 the admin teachers.</p>
13599
13600 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13601 Edu?</strong></p>
13602
13603 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
13604 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
13605 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
13606
13607 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
13608 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
13609 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
13610 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
13611 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
13612
13613 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13614 Edu?</strong></p>
13615
13616 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
13617
13618 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13619
13620 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
13621 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
13622 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
13623 LibreOffice.</p>
13624
13625 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13626 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13627
13628 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
13629 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
13630 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
13631
13632       </div>
13633       <div class="tags">
13634
13635
13636         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>.
13637
13638
13639       </div>
13640     </div>
13641     <div class="padding"></div>
13642
13643     <div class="entry">
13644       <div class="title">
13645         <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>
13646       </div>
13647       <div class="date">
13648         25th March 2012
13649       </div>
13650       <div class="body">
13651         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
13652
13653 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
13654 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
13655 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
13656 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
13657 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
13658 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
13659 and download as a
13660 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
13661 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
13662
13663 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
13664   <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"' />
13665     <p>Download video as
13666       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
13667 </video></p>
13668
13669       </div>
13670       <div class="tags">
13671
13672
13673         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>.
13674
13675
13676       </div>
13677     </div>
13678     <div class="padding"></div>
13679
13680     <div class="entry">
13681       <div class="title">
13682         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
13683       </div>
13684       <div class="date">
13685         19th March 2012
13686       </div>
13687       <div class="body">
13688         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13689 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
13690 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
13691 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
13692 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
13693
13694 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13695
13696 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
13697 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
13698 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
13699 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
13700 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
13701 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
13702 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
13703 installations.</p>
13704
13705 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13706 project?</strong></p>
13707
13708 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
13709 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
13710 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
13711 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
13712 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
13713 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
13714 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
13715 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
13716 these things we decided to try it.</p>
13717
13718 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13719 Edu?</strong></p>
13720
13721 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
13722 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
13723 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
13724 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
13725 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
13726 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
13727 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
13728 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
13729
13730 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13731 Edu?</strong></p>
13732
13733 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
13734 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
13735 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
13736 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
13737 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
13738
13739 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13740
13741 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
13742 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
13743 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
13744 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
13745 that counts...)</p>
13746
13747 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13748 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13749
13750 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
13751 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
13752 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
13753 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
13754 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
13755 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
13756 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
13757 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
13758 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
13759 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
13760 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
13761
13762 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
13763 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
13764 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
13765
13766       </div>
13767       <div class="tags">
13768
13769
13770         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>.
13771
13772
13773       </div>
13774     </div>
13775     <div class="padding"></div>
13776
13777     <div class="entry">
13778       <div class="title">
13779         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
13780       </div>
13781       <div class="date">
13782         16th March 2012
13783       </div>
13784       <div class="body">
13785         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
13786 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
13787 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
13788 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
13789
13790 <ol>
13791
13792 <li>The documentation is written in a
13793 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
13794 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
13795 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
13796 docbook XML.</li>
13797
13798 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
13799 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
13800 with the translated text.</li>
13801
13802 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
13803 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
13804 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
13805 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
13806 images.</li>
13807
13808 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
13809 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
13810
13811 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
13812 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
13813
13814 </ol>
13815
13816 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
13817 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
13818 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
13819 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
13820 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
13821
13822 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
13823 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
13824 package</a>.</p>
13825
13826       </div>
13827       <div class="tags">
13828
13829
13830         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>.
13831
13832
13833       </div>
13834     </div>
13835     <div class="padding"></div>
13836
13837     <div class="entry">
13838       <div class="title">
13839         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
13840       </div>
13841       <div class="date">
13842         11th March 2012
13843       </div>
13844       <div class="body">
13845         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
13846 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
13847 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13848 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
13849 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
13850 you have not done so already.</p>
13851
13852 <p>I plan to present the new version at
13853 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
13854 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
13855 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
13856
13857       </div>
13858       <div class="tags">
13859
13860
13861         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>.
13862
13863
13864       </div>
13865     </div>
13866     <div class="padding"></div>
13867
13868     <div class="entry">
13869       <div class="title">
13870         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
13871       </div>
13872       <div class="date">
13873          9th March 2012
13874       </div>
13875       <div class="body">
13876         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
13877 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
13878 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13879 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
13880 more international audience.</p>
13881
13882 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13883 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
13884 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
13885 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
13886 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
13887 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
13888 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
13889
13890
13891 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13892
13893 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
13894 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
13895 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
13896 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
13897 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
13898 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
13899 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
13900 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
13901 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
13902 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
13903 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
13904
13905 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13906 project?</strong></p>
13907
13908 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
13909 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
13910 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
13911 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
13912 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
13913 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
13914 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
13915 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
13916 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
13917 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
13918 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
13919 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
13920 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
13921
13922 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13923 Edu?</strong></p>
13924
13925 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
13926 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
13927 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
13928 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
13929 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
13930 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
13931 Japan.</p>
13932
13933 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13934 Edu?</strong></p>
13935
13936 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
13937 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
13938 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
13939 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
13940 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
13941 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
13942 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
13943 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
13944 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
13945 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
13946 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
13947 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
13948 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
13949 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
13950 help.</p>
13951
13952 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13953
13954 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
13955 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
13956 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
13957 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
13958 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
13959 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
13960 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
13961 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
13962 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
13963 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
13964 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
13965
13966 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13967 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13968
13969 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
13970 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
13971 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
13972 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
13973 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
13974 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
13975 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
13976 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
13977 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
13978 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
13979 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
13980 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
13981
13982       </div>
13983       <div class="tags">
13984
13985
13986         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>.
13987
13988
13989       </div>
13990     </div>
13991     <div class="padding"></div>
13992
13993     <div class="entry">
13994       <div class="title">
13995         <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>
13996       </div>
13997       <div class="date">
13998          7th March 2012
13999       </div>
14000       <div class="body">
14001         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
14002
14003 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
14004 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
14005 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
14006 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
14007 download as a
14008 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
14009 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
14010
14011 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
14012   <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"' />
14013     <p>Download video as
14014       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
14015 </video></p>
14016
14017       </div>
14018       <div class="tags">
14019
14020
14021         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>.
14022
14023
14024       </div>
14025     </div>
14026     <div class="padding"></div>
14027
14028     <div class="entry">
14029       <div class="title">
14030         <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>
14031       </div>
14032       <div class="date">
14033          4th March 2012
14034       </div>
14035       <div class="body">
14036         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
14037 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14038 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
14039 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
14040 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
14041 need a software solution for your school.</p>
14042
14043       </div>
14044       <div class="tags">
14045
14046
14047         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>.
14048
14049
14050       </div>
14051     </div>
14052     <div class="padding"></div>
14053
14054     <div class="entry">
14055       <div class="title">
14056         <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>
14057       </div>
14058       <div class="date">
14059          3rd March 2012
14060       </div>
14061       <div class="body">
14062         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
14063 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
14064 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
14065 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
14066 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
14067 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
14068 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
14069 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
14070 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
14071 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
14072 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
14073 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
14074 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
14075 year...</p>
14076
14077 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
14078 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
14079 name,
14080 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
14081 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
14082 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
14083 mean). I've been following
14084 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
14085 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
14086 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
14087 Check it out. :)</p>
14088
14089       </div>
14090       <div class="tags">
14091
14092
14093         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>.
14094
14095
14096       </div>
14097     </div>
14098     <div class="padding"></div>
14099
14100     <div class="entry">
14101       <div class="title">
14102         <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>
14103       </div>
14104       <div class="date">
14105         27th February 2012
14106       </div>
14107       <div class="body">
14108         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
14109 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14110 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
14111 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
14112 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
14113 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
14114 need a software solution for your school.</p>
14115
14116       </div>
14117       <div class="tags">
14118
14119
14120         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>.
14121
14122
14123       </div>
14124     </div>
14125     <div class="padding"></div>
14126
14127     <div class="entry">
14128       <div class="title">
14129         <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>
14130       </div>
14131       <div class="date">
14132         19th February 2012
14133       </div>
14134       <div class="body">
14135         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
14136 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
14137 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
14138 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
14139 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
14140 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
14141 solution for your school.</p>
14142
14143       </div>
14144       <div class="tags">
14145
14146
14147         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>.
14148
14149
14150       </div>
14151     </div>
14152     <div class="padding"></div>
14153
14154     <div class="entry">
14155       <div class="title">
14156         <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>
14157       </div>
14158       <div class="date">
14159         14th February 2012
14160       </div>
14161       <div class="body">
14162         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
14163 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
14164 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
14165 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
14166 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
14167 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
14168 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
14169 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
14170 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
14171
14172 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
14173 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
14174 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
14175 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
14176 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
14177
14178 <blockquote><pre>
14179 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
14180 do
14181     printf "Failed disk $d: "
14182     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
14183 done
14184 </blockquote></pre>
14185
14186 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
14187 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
14188
14189 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
14190
14191 <blockquote><pre>
14192 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
14193 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
14194 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
14195 </blockquote></pre>
14196
14197 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
14198 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
14199 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
14200 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
14201 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
14202 mounted inside my box.</p>
14203
14204 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
14205 Software RAID in the
14206 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
14207 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
14208 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
14209 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
14210 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
14211 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
14212
14213       </div>
14214       <div class="tags">
14215
14216
14217         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>.
14218
14219
14220       </div>
14221     </div>
14222     <div class="padding"></div>
14223
14224     <div class="entry">
14225       <div class="title">
14226         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
14227       </div>
14228       <div class="date">
14229         13th February 2012
14230       </div>
14231       <div class="body">
14232         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
14233 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
14234 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
14235 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
14236 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
14237 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
14238 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
14239 change the global proxy setting by editing
14240 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
14241 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
14242
14243 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
14244 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
14245 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
14246
14247 <blockquote><pre>
14248 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
14249 {
14250    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
14251        isPlainHostName(host) ||
14252        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
14253       return "DIRECT";
14254    else
14255       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
14256 }
14257 </pre></blockquote>
14258
14259 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
14260
14261 <blockquote><pre>
14262 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
14263 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
14264 </pre></blockquote>
14265
14266 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
14267 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
14268 would be used for
14269 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
14270 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
14271 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
14272 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
14273 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
14274 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
14275 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
14276 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
14277 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
14278 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
14279
14280 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
14281 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
14282 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
14283 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
14284 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
14285 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
14286
14287 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
14288 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
14289 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
14290 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
14291 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
14292 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
14293 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
14294 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
14295 the network setup changes.</p>
14296
14297 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
14298 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
14299 draft</a> and a
14300 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
14301 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
14302
14303       </div>
14304       <div class="tags">
14305
14306
14307         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>.
14308
14309
14310       </div>
14311     </div>
14312     <div class="padding"></div>
14313
14314     <div class="entry">
14315       <div class="title">
14316         <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>
14317       </div>
14318       <div class="date">
14319          5th February 2012
14320       </div>
14321       <div class="body">
14322         <p>Since the Lenny version of
14323 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
14324 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
14325 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
14326 in the morning.  This is done using the
14327 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
14328
14329 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
14330 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
14331 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
14332 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
14333 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
14334 the
14335 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
14336 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
14337 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
14338 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
14339 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
14340
14341 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
14342 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
14343 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
14344 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
14345 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
14346 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
14347 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
14348
14349 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
14350 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
14351 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
14352 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
14353 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
14354
14355       </div>
14356       <div class="tags">
14357
14358
14359         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>.
14360
14361
14362       </div>
14363     </div>
14364     <div class="padding"></div>
14365
14366     <div class="entry">
14367       <div class="title">
14368         <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>
14369       </div>
14370       <div class="date">
14371          4th February 2012
14372       </div>
14373       <div class="body">
14374         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
14375 publish the third beta version of
14376 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
14377 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
14378 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
14379 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
14380 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
14381 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
14382 on the project announcement list.</p>
14383
14384 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
14385 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
14386
14387 <ul>
14388
14389 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
14390   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
14391   the installation.</li>
14392
14393 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
14394   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
14395
14396 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
14397   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
14398   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
14399
14400 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
14401   for the local system administrator is created during installation
14402   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
14403   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
14404   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
14405   up to date on the system.</li>
14406
14407 </ul>
14408
14409 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
14410 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
14411 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
14412 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
14413
14414 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
14415 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
14416 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
14417 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
14418 will see you there?</p>
14419
14420       </div>
14421       <div class="tags">
14422
14423
14424         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>.
14425
14426
14427       </div>
14428     </div>
14429     <div class="padding"></div>
14430
14431     <div class="entry">
14432       <div class="title">
14433         <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>
14434       </div>
14435       <div class="date">
14436         27th January 2012
14437       </div>
14438       <div class="body">
14439         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
14440 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
14441 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
14442 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
14443 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
14444 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
14445 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
14446
14447 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
14448 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
14449 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
14450 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
14451 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
14452 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
14453 not taken care of by this.</p>
14454
14455 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
14456 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
14457 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
14458 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
14459 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
14460 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
14461 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
14462 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
14463 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
14464 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
14465 firmware packages.</p>
14466
14467 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
14468 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
14469 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
14470 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
14471 initrd with extra firmware, the
14472 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
14473 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
14474 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
14475
14476 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
14477 network cards working.  For this,
14478 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
14479 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
14480 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
14481
14482 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
14483 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
14484 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
14485
14486 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
14487 try.</p>
14488
14489       </div>
14490       <div class="tags">
14491
14492
14493         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>.
14494
14495
14496       </div>
14497     </div>
14498     <div class="padding"></div>
14499
14500     <div class="entry">
14501       <div class="title">
14502         <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>
14503       </div>
14504       <div class="date">
14505         25th January 2012
14506       </div>
14507       <div class="body">
14508         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
14509 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
14510 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
14511 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
14512 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
14513
14514 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
14515 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
14516 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
14517 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
14518 this is done, log on to the central server and run
14519 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
14520 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
14521 will look similar to this:</p>
14522
14523 <p><blockquote><pre>
14524 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
14525 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
14526 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.
14527
14528 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
14529
14530 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14531 enter password: *******
14532 %
14533 </pre></blockquote></p>
14534
14535 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
14536 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
14537 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
14538 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
14539 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
14540 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
14541 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
14542 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
14543 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
14544 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
14545 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
14546 automatically.</p>
14547
14548 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
14549 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
14550
14551 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
14552 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
14553 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
14554
14555       </div>
14556       <div class="tags">
14557
14558
14559         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>.
14560
14561
14562       </div>
14563     </div>
14564     <div class="padding"></div>
14565
14566     <div class="entry">
14567       <div class="title">
14568         <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>
14569       </div>
14570       <div class="date">
14571         10th January 2012
14572       </div>
14573       <div class="body">
14574         <p>In the Squeeze version of
14575 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
14576 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
14577 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
14578 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
14579 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
14580 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
14581 first time.</p>
14582
14583 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
14584 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
14585 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
14586 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
14587
14588 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
14589 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
14590 new setting.</p>
14591
14592 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
14593 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
14594 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
14595
14596       </div>
14597       <div class="tags">
14598
14599
14600         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>.
14601
14602
14603       </div>
14604     </div>
14605     <div class="padding"></div>
14606
14607     <div class="entry">
14608       <div class="title">
14609         <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>
14610       </div>
14611       <div class="date">
14612          7th January 2012
14613       </div>
14614       <div class="body">
14615         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
14616 the second beta version of
14617 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
14618 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
14619 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
14620 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
14621 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
14622 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
14623 on the project announcement list.</p>
14624
14625       </div>
14626       <div class="tags">
14627
14628
14629         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>.
14630
14631
14632       </div>
14633     </div>
14634     <div class="padding"></div>
14635
14636     <div class="entry">
14637       <div class="title">
14638         <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>
14639       </div>
14640       <div class="date">
14641          3rd January 2012
14642       </div>
14643       <div class="body">
14644         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
14645 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
14646 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
14647 interesting.</p>
14648
14649 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
14650 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
14651 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
14652 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
14653 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
14654 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
14655 wrap up its tasks.</p>
14656
14657 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
14658 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
14659 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
14660 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
14661 because I was typing.</P>
14662
14663 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
14664 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
14665 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
14666 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
14667 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
14668 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
14669 generate entropy.</p>
14670
14671 <p>The fix is in
14672 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
14673 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
14674 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
14675 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
14676
14677       </div>
14678       <div class="tags">
14679
14680
14681         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>.
14682
14683
14684       </div>
14685     </div>
14686     <div class="padding"></div>
14687
14688     <div class="entry">
14689       <div class="title">
14690         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
14691       </div>
14692       <div class="date">
14693         21st November 2011
14694       </div>
14695       <div class="body">
14696         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
14697 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
14698 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
14699 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
14700 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
14701 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
14702 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
14703 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
14704 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
14705 the tools to do so.</p>
14706
14707 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
14708 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
14709 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
14710 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
14711
14712 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
14713 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
14714 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
14715 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
14716 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
14717 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
14718 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
14719 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
14720
14721 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
14722 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
14723 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
14724
14725 <p><pre>
14726 #!/usr/bin/perl
14727 use strict;
14728 use warnings;
14729 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
14730 BEGIN {
14731     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
14732     my %rhelmodules = (
14733         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
14734         );
14735     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
14736         eval "use $module;";
14737         if ($@) {
14738             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
14739             system("yum install -y $pkg");
14740             eval "use $module;";
14741         }
14742     }
14743 }
14744 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
14745
14746 upgrade_dell();
14747
14748 exit 0;
14749
14750 sub run_firmware_script {
14751     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
14752     unless ($script) {
14753         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
14754         exit 1
14755     }
14756     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
14757
14758     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
14759         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
14760     } else {
14761         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
14762     }
14763 }
14764
14765 sub run_firmware_scripts {
14766     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
14767     # Run firmware packages
14768     for my $dir (@dirs) {
14769         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
14770         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
14771         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
14772             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
14773             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
14774         }
14775         closedir $dh;
14776     }
14777 }
14778
14779 sub download {
14780     my $url = shift;
14781     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
14782     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
14783 }
14784
14785 sub upgrade_dell {
14786     my @dirs;
14787     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
14788     chomp $product;
14789
14790     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
14791
14792         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
14793         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
14794
14795         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
14796             CLEANUP => 1
14797             );
14798         chdir($tmpdir);
14799         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
14800         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
14801         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
14802         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
14803         my $fwopts = "-q";
14804         if (@paths) {
14805             for my $url (@paths) {
14806                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
14807             }
14808             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
14809         } else {
14810             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
14811             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
14812         }
14813         chdir('/');
14814     } else {
14815         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
14816         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
14817     }
14818 }
14819
14820 sub fetch_dell_fw {
14821     my $path = shift;
14822     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
14823     download($url);
14824 }
14825
14826 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
14827 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
14828 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
14829 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
14830     my $filename = shift;
14831
14832     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
14833     chomp $product;
14834     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
14835
14836     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
14837
14838     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
14839     my @paths;
14840     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
14841         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
14842         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
14843         my $oscode;
14844         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
14845             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
14846         } else {
14847             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
14848         }
14849         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
14850         {
14851             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
14852         }
14853     }
14854     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
14855         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
14856
14857         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
14858         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
14859
14860         my $cpath = $component->{path};
14861         for my $path (@paths) {
14862             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
14863                 push(@paths, $cpath);
14864             }
14865         }
14866     }
14867     return @paths;
14868 }
14869 </pre>
14870
14871 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
14872 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
14873 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
14874 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
14875 outdated.</p>
14876
14877       </div>
14878       <div class="tags">
14879
14880
14881         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>.
14882
14883
14884       </div>
14885     </div>
14886     <div class="padding"></div>
14887
14888     <div class="entry">
14889       <div class="title">
14890         <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>
14891       </div>
14892       <div class="date">
14893          7th October 2011
14894       </div>
14895       <div class="body">
14896         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
14897 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
14898 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
14899 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
14900 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
14901 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
14902 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
14903 models.</p>
14904
14905 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
14906 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
14907 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
14908 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
14909
14910 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
14911 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
14912 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
14913 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
14914 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
14915 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
14916 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
14917 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
14918 distributed.</p>
14919
14920 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
14921
14922 <ul>
14923
14924 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
14925   other relevant equipment.</li>
14926
14927 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
14928
14929 </ul>
14930
14931 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
14932 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
14933 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
14934 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
14935 books available.</p>
14936
14937 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
14938 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
14939 libraries. :)</p>
14940
14941       </div>
14942       <div class="tags">
14943
14944
14945         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>.
14946
14947
14948       </div>
14949     </div>
14950     <div class="padding"></div>
14951
14952     <div class="entry">
14953       <div class="title">
14954         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
14955       </div>
14956       <div class="date">
14957         17th September 2011
14958       </div>
14959       <div class="body">
14960         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
14961 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
14962 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
14963 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
14964 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
14965 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
14966 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
14967 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
14968
14969 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
14970
14971 <blockquote><pre>
14972 #!/bin/sh
14973 # apt-get install lsdvd
14974 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14975 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
14976 </pre></blockquote>
14977
14978 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
14979 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
14980 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
14981 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
14982
14983 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
14984 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
14985 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
14986 back as an ISO.
14987
14988 <blockquote><pre>
14989 #!/bin/sh
14990 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
14991 set -e
14992 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
14993 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14994 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
14995 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
14996 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
14997 </pre></blockquote>
14998
14999 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
15000
15001 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
15002 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
15003 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
15004 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
15005 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
15006
15007 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
15008 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
15009 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
15010 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
15011 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
15012 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
15013
15014       </div>
15015       <div class="tags">
15016
15017
15018         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>.
15019
15020
15021       </div>
15022     </div>
15023     <div class="padding"></div>
15024
15025     <div class="entry">
15026       <div class="title">
15027         <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>
15028       </div>
15029       <div class="date">
15030          4th August 2011
15031       </div>
15032       <div class="body">
15033         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
15034 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
15035 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
15036 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
15037 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
15038 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
15039 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
15040 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
15041 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
15042
15043 <p><blockquote>
15044 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
15045 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
15046 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
15047 </blockquote></p>
15048
15049 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
15050 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
15051 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
15052 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
15053 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
15054 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
15055 hard to explain.</p>
15056
15057 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
15058 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
15059 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
15060 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
15061 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
15062 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
15063 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
15064 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
15065 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
15066 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
15067 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
15068 mode).</p>
15069
15070 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
15071 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
15072 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
15073 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
15074 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
15075 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
15076 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
15077 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
15078 after visiting single user mode.</p>
15079
15080 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
15081 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
15082 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
15083 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
15084 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
15085 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
15086 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
15087 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
15088
15089 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
15090 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
15091 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
15092
15093       </div>
15094       <div class="tags">
15095
15096
15097         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>.
15098
15099
15100       </div>
15101     </div>
15102     <div class="padding"></div>
15103
15104     <div class="entry">
15105       <div class="title">
15106         <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>
15107       </div>
15108       <div class="date">
15109         30th July 2011
15110       </div>
15111       <div class="body">
15112         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
15113 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
15114 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
15115 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
15116 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
15117 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
15118 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
15119 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
15120 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
15121 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
15122 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
15123 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
15124 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
15125
15126 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
15127 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
15128 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
15129 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
15130 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
15131 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
15132 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
15133 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
15134 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
15135
15136 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
15137 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
15138 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
15139 is presented.</p>
15140
15141 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
15142 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
15143 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
15144 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
15145 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
15146 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
15147 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
15148 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
15149 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
15150 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
15151 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
15152 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
15153 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
15154 find time to push this forward.</p>
15155
15156       </div>
15157       <div class="tags">
15158
15159
15160         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>.
15161
15162
15163       </div>
15164     </div>
15165     <div class="padding"></div>
15166
15167     <div class="entry">
15168       <div class="title">
15169         <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>
15170       </div>
15171       <div class="date">
15172         29th July 2011
15173       </div>
15174       <div class="body">
15175         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
15176 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
15177 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
15178 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
15179 issues.</p>
15180
15181 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
15182 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
15183 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
15184
15185 <ol>
15186
15187 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
15188 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
15189 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
15190 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
15191 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
15192 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
15193 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
15194 Debian.</li>
15195
15196 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
15197 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
15198 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
15199 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
15200 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
15201 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
15202 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
15203 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
15204 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
15205 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
15206 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
15207 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
15208 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
15209
15210 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
15211 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
15212 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
15213 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
15214 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
15215 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
15216 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
15217 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
15218 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
15219 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
15220
15221 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
15222 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
15223 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
15224 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
15225 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
15226 latter behaviour.</li>
15227
15228 </ol>
15229
15230 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
15231 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
15232 it do not matter much.</p>
15233
15234 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
15235 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
15236 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
15237
15238       </div>
15239       <div class="tags">
15240
15241
15242         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>.
15243
15244
15245       </div>
15246     </div>
15247     <div class="padding"></div>
15248
15249     <div class="entry">
15250       <div class="title">
15251         <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>
15252       </div>
15253       <div class="date">
15254         26th July 2011
15255       </div>
15256       <div class="body">
15257         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
15258 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
15259 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
15260 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
15261 security support for a few years.</p>
15262
15263 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
15264 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
15265 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
15266 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
15267 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
15268 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
15269 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
15270 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
15271 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
15272 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
15273 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
15274 easier in the future.</p>
15275
15276 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
15277 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
15278 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
15279 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
15280 do not have time for.</p>
15281
15282       </div>
15283       <div class="tags">
15284
15285
15286         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>.
15287
15288
15289       </div>
15290     </div>
15291     <div class="padding"></div>
15292
15293     <div class="entry">
15294       <div class="title">
15295         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
15296       </div>
15297       <div class="date">
15298         20th June 2011
15299       </div>
15300       <div class="body">
15301         <p>Reading
15302 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
15303 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
15304 parts of the
15305 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
15306 and
15307 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
15308 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
15309 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
15310 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
15311
15312       </div>
15313       <div class="tags">
15314
15315
15316         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>.
15317
15318
15319       </div>
15320     </div>
15321     <div class="padding"></div>
15322
15323     <div class="entry">
15324       <div class="title">
15325         <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>
15326       </div>
15327       <div class="date">
15328         30th April 2011
15329       </div>
15330       <div class="body">
15331         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
15332 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
15333 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
15334 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
15335 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
15336 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
15337 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
15338 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
15339 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
15340 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
15341
15342 <p>Where is it?  Visit
15343 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
15344 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
15345 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
15346 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
15347
15348       </div>
15349       <div class="tags">
15350
15351
15352         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>.
15353
15354
15355       </div>
15356     </div>
15357     <div class="padding"></div>
15358
15359     <div class="entry">
15360       <div class="title">
15361         <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>
15362       </div>
15363       <div class="date">
15364         29th April 2011
15365       </div>
15366       <div class="body">
15367         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
15368 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
15369 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
15370 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
15371 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
15372 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
15373 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
15374 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
15375 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
15376 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
15377 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
15378 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
15379 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
15380
15381 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
15382 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
15383 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
15384 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
15385 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
15386 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
15387 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
15388 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
15389 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
15390 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
15391 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
15392 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
15393 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
15394
15395 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
15396 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
15397 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
15398 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
15399 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
15400 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
15401 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
15402 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
15403 it.</p>
15404
15405 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
15406 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
15407 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
15408 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
15409 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
15410 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
15411 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
15412
15413 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
15414 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
15415 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
15416 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
15417 and range= options.</p>
15418
15419 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
15420 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
15421 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
15422 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
15423 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
15424 to best handle this.  I've noticed
15425 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
15426 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
15427 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
15428 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
15429
15430 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
15431 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
15432 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
15433 discussions instead of only
15434 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
15435 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
15436 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
15437 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
15438 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
15439 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
15440
15441       </div>
15442       <div class="tags">
15443
15444
15445         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>.
15446
15447
15448       </div>
15449     </div>
15450     <div class="padding"></div>
15451
15452     <div class="entry">
15453       <div class="title">
15454         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
15455       </div>
15456       <div class="date">
15457          6th April 2011
15458       </div>
15459       <div class="body">
15460         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
15461 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
15462 A few days ago the project
15463 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
15464 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
15465 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
15466 into Gnash.</p>
15467
15468       </div>
15469       <div class="tags">
15470
15471
15472         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>.
15473
15474
15475       </div>
15476     </div>
15477     <div class="padding"></div>
15478
15479     <div class="entry">
15480       <div class="title">
15481         <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>
15482       </div>
15483       <div class="date">
15484          3rd April 2011
15485       </div>
15486       <div class="body">
15487         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
15488 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
15489 update in English.</p>
15490
15491 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
15492 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
15493 of the British service
15494 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
15495 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
15496 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
15497 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
15498 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
15499 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
15500 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
15501 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
15502 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
15503 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
15504 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
15505 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
15506 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
15507
15508 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
15509 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
15510 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
15511 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
15512 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
15513 public infrastructure.</p>
15514
15515 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
15516 such service?</p>
15517
15518       </div>
15519       <div class="tags">
15520
15521
15522         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>.
15523
15524
15525       </div>
15526     </div>
15527     <div class="padding"></div>
15528
15529     <div class="entry">
15530       <div class="title">
15531         <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>
15532       </div>
15533       <div class="date">
15534         28th January 2011
15535       </div>
15536       <div class="body">
15537         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
15538 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
15539 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
15540 available on the Internet, and check our locally
15541 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
15542 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
15543 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
15544 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
15545 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
15546 out which security holes were present in our free software
15547 collection.</p>
15548
15549 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
15550 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
15551 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
15552 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
15553 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
15554 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
15555 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
15556 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
15557 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
15558 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
15559 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
15560 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
15561 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
15562 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
15563 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
15564 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
15565
15566 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
15567 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
15568 check out, one could look up
15569 <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
15570 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
15571 The most recent one is
15572 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
15573 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
15574 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
15575
15576 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
15577 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
15578 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
15579 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
15580 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
15581 security issues out.</p>
15582
15583 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
15584 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
15585 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
15586 RHEL is providing
15587 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
15588 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
15589 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
15590
15591 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
15592 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
15593 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
15594 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
15595 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
15596 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
15597 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
15598 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
15599 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
15600 established soon.</p>
15601
15602 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
15603 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
15604 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
15605 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
15606 for their packages.</p>
15607
15608       </div>
15609       <div class="tags">
15610
15611
15612         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>.
15613
15614
15615       </div>
15616     </div>
15617     <div class="padding"></div>
15618
15619     <div class="entry">
15620       <div class="title">
15621         <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>
15622       </div>
15623       <div class="date">
15624         23rd January 2011
15625       </div>
15626       <div class="body">
15627         <p>In the
15628 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
15629 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
15630 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
15631 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
15632 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
15633 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
15634 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
15635 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
15636 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
15637 one of my machines like this:</p>
15638
15639 <pre>
15640 loaded modules:
15641 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
15642 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
15643 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
15644 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
15645 10de:03ec pata_amd
15646 10de:03f6 sata_nv
15647 1022:1103 k8temp
15648 109e:036e bttv
15649 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
15650 11ab:4364 sky2
15651 </pre>
15652
15653 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
15654 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
15655
15656 <pre>
15657 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
15658     echo loaded pci modules:
15659     (
15660         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
15661         for address in * ; do
15662             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
15663                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
15664                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
15665                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
15666                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
15667                     echo "$id $module"
15668                 fi
15669             fi
15670         done
15671     )
15672     echo
15673 fi
15674 </pre>
15675
15676 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
15677 mappings:</p>
15678
15679 <pre>
15680 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
15681     echo loaded usb modules:
15682     (
15683         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
15684         for address in * ; do
15685             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
15686                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
15687                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
15688                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
15689                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
15690                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
15691                         echo "$id $module"
15692                     fi
15693                 fi
15694             fi
15695         done
15696     )
15697     echo
15698 fi
15699 </pre>
15700
15701 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
15702 well.</p>
15703
15704       </div>
15705       <div class="tags">
15706
15707
15708         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>.
15709
15710
15711       </div>
15712     </div>
15713     <div class="padding"></div>
15714
15715     <div class="entry">
15716       <div class="title">
15717         <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>
15718       </div>
15719       <div class="date">
15720         16th January 2011
15721       </div>
15722       <div class="body">
15723         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
15724 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
15725 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
15726 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
15727 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
15728 the Wikipedia article on
15729 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
15730 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
15731 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
15732 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
15733 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
15734 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
15735 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
15736 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
15737 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
15738 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
15739 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
15740 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
15741
15742 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
15743 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
15744 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
15745 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
15746 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
15747 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
15748 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
15749 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
15750 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
15751 from last week</a>.</p>
15752
15753 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
15754 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
15755 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
15756 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
15757 was without royalties and license terms, check out
15758 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
15759 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
15760
15761 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
15762 available from
15763 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
15764 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
15765 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
15766
15767 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
15768 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
15769 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
15770 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
15771
15772       </div>
15773       <div class="tags">
15774
15775
15776         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>.
15777
15778
15779       </div>
15780     </div>
15781     <div class="padding"></div>
15782
15783     <div class="entry">
15784       <div class="title">
15785         <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>
15786       </div>
15787       <div class="date">
15788         12th January 2011
15789       </div>
15790       <div class="body">
15791         <p>Today I discovered
15792 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
15793 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
15794 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
15795 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
15796 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
15797 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
15798 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
15799 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
15800 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
15801 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
15802 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
15803 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
15804 on the Google announcement is available from
15805 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
15806 A good read. :)</p>
15807
15808 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
15809 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
15810 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
15811 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
15812 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
15813 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
15814 browsers support H.264, and others support
15815 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
15816 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
15817 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
15818 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
15819 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
15820 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
15821 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
15822 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
15823
15824 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
15825 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
15826 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
15827 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
15828 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
15829 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
15830 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
15831
15832 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
15833 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
15834 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
15835 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
15836 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
15837 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
15838 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
15839
15840 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
15841 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
15842 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
15843 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
15844 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
15845 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
15846 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
15847
15848 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
15849 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
15850 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
15851 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
15852 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
15853 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
15854 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
15855 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
15856 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
15857 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
15858 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
15859 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
15860 I guess time will tell.</p>
15861
15862 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
15863 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
15864 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
15865
15866       </div>
15867       <div class="tags">
15868
15869
15870         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>.
15871
15872
15873       </div>
15874     </div>
15875     <div class="padding"></div>
15876
15877     <div class="entry">
15878       <div class="title">
15879         <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>
15880       </div>
15881       <div class="date">
15882         30th December 2010
15883       </div>
15884       <div class="body">
15885         <p>After trying to
15886 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
15887 Ogg Theora</a> to
15888 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
15889 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
15890 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
15891 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
15892 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
15893 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
15894 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
15895
15896 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
15897 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
15898 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
15899 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
15900 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
15901 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
15902 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
15903
15904 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
15905 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
15906
15907       </div>
15908       <div class="tags">
15909
15910
15911         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>.
15912
15913
15914       </div>
15915     </div>
15916     <div class="padding"></div>
15917
15918     <div class="entry">
15919       <div class="title">
15920         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
15921       </div>
15922       <div class="date">
15923         27th December 2010
15924       </div>
15925       <div class="body">
15926         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
15927 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
15928 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
15929 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
15930 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
15931 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
15932 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
15933 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
15934
15935 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
15936 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
15937 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
15938 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
15939 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
15940 page</a>.</p>
15941
15942 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
15943 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
15944 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
15945 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
15946 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
15947 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
15948 specification on equal terms.</p>
15949
15950 <blockquote>
15951
15952 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
15953 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
15954 open standard:</p>
15955
15956 <ul>
15957
15958 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
15959 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
15960 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
15961 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
15962
15963 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
15964 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
15965 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
15966 nominal fee.</li>
15967
15968 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
15969 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
15970 free basis.</li>
15971
15972 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
15973
15974 </ul>
15975 </blockquote>
15976
15977 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
15978 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
15979 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
15980 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
15981 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
15982 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
15983 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
15984
15985 <blockquote>
15986
15987 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
15988
15989 <ol>
15990
15991 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
15992 tilgængelig.</li>
15993
15994 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
15995 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
15996
15997 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
15998 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
15999
16000 </ol>
16001
16002 </blockquote>
16003
16004 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
16005 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
16006
16007 <blockquote>
16008
16009 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
16010
16011 <ol>
16012
16013 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
16014 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
16015
16016 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
16017 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
16018 Standard themselves;</li>
16019
16020 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
16021 any party or in any business model;</li>
16022
16023 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
16024 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
16025 parties;</li>
16026
16027 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
16028 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
16029 parties.</li>
16030
16031 </ol>
16032
16033 </blockquote>
16034
16035 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
16036 its
16037 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
16038 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
16039
16040 <blockquote>
16041 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
16042
16043 <ul>
16044
16045 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
16046   democratic:
16047
16048          <ul>
16049
16050          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
16051             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
16052             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
16053             and managed.</li>
16054
16055          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
16056             method, can be changed through input from all
16057             participants.</li>
16058
16059          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
16060             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
16061
16062          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
16063             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
16064
16065          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
16066             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
16067             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
16068
16069          </ul>
16070
16071 </li>
16072
16073 </ul>
16074
16075 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
16076 <ul>
16077
16078 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
16079   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
16080   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
16081   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
16082   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
16083
16084 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
16085   a technical or economic barriers</li>
16086
16087 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
16088   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
16089   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
16090   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
16091   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
16092   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
16093   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
16094   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
16095   intended to function.</li>
16096
16097 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
16098   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
16099   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
16100
16101 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
16102   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
16103   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
16104   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
16105   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
16106   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
16107   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
16108   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
16109
16110       <ul>
16111
16112       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
16113         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
16114         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
16115
16116       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
16117         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
16118         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
16119         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
16120
16121       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
16122         licensor</li>
16123
16124       </ul>
16125 </li>
16126
16127 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
16128   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
16129   or restricted licensing terms</li>
16130
16131 </ul>
16132
16133 </blockquote>
16134
16135 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
16136 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
16137 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
16138 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
16139 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
16140 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
16141 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
16142 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
16143 Standards.</p>
16144
16145       </div>
16146       <div class="tags">
16147
16148
16149         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>.
16150
16151
16152       </div>
16153     </div>
16154     <div class="padding"></div>
16155
16156     <div class="entry">
16157       <div class="title">
16158         <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>
16159       </div>
16160       <div class="date">
16161         25th December 2010
16162       </div>
16163       <div class="body">
16164         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
16165 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
16166
16167 <blockquote>
16168
16169 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
16170 as follows:</p>
16171
16172 <ol>
16173
16174 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
16175 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
16176 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
16177
16178 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
16179 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
16180 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
16181 parties.</li>
16182
16183 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
16184 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
16185 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
16186
16187 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
16188 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
16189
16190 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
16191
16192 </ol>
16193
16194 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
16195 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
16196 products based on the standard.</p>
16197 </blockquote>
16198
16199 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
16200 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
16201 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
16202 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
16203 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
16204 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
16205 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
16206 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
16207
16208 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
16209
16210 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
16211 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
16212 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
16213 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
16214 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
16215 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
16216 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
16217 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
16218 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
16219 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
16220 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
16221 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
16222 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
16223 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
16224
16225 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
16226
16227 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
16228 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
16229 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
16230 documentation indicating this.</p>
16231
16232 <p>According to
16233 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
16234 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
16235 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
16236 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
16237 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
16238 report is correct.</p>
16239
16240 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
16241
16242 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
16243 container format</a> and both the
16244 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
16245 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
16246 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
16247
16248 <blockquote>
16249
16250 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
16251 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
16252 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
16253 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
16254 specification compliance.
16255
16256 </blockquote>
16257
16258 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
16259 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
16260 this is the term:<p>
16261
16262 <blockquote>
16263
16264 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
16265 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
16266 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
16267 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
16268 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
16269 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
16270 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
16271 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
16272 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
16273 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
16274 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
16275 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
16276
16277 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
16278 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
16279 </blockquote>
16280
16281 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
16282 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
16283 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
16284 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
16285 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
16286
16287 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
16288
16289 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
16290 Theora format.
16291 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
16292 and
16293 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
16294 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
16295 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
16296 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
16297 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
16298 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
16299 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
16300 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
16301
16302 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
16303
16304 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
16305
16306 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
16307
16308 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
16309 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
16310 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
16311 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
16312 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
16313 this.</p>
16314
16315 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
16316 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
16317
16318       </div>
16319       <div class="tags">
16320
16321
16322         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>.
16323
16324
16325       </div>
16326     </div>
16327     <div class="padding"></div>
16328
16329     <div class="entry">
16330       <div class="title">
16331         <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>
16332       </div>
16333       <div class="date">
16334         25th December 2010
16335       </div>
16336       <div class="body">
16337         <p>A few days ago
16338 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
16339 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
16340 2.0 of
16341 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
16342 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
16343 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
16344 Nothing very surprising there, given
16345 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
16346 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
16347 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
16348 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
16349 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
16350 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
16351 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
16352 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
16353 standard definition from its content.</p>
16354
16355 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
16356 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
16357 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
16358 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
16359 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
16360 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
16361 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
16362 background information about that story is available in
16363 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
16364 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
16365
16366 <blockquote>
16367 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
16368 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
16369 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
16370
16371 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
16372
16373 <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>
16374
16375 <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>
16376
16377 <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>
16378
16379 <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>
16380
16381 <p>
16382 <ul>
16383 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
16384 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
16385 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
16386 </ul>
16387 </p>
16388
16389 <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>
16390
16391 <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>
16392
16393 <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>
16394
16395 <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>
16396
16397 <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>
16398
16399
16400 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
16401 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
16402 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
16403 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
16404 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
16405 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
16406
16407 </p>
16408
16409 <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>
16410
16411 <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>
16412
16413 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
16414
16415 <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>
16416
16417 <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>
16418
16419 <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>
16420
16421 <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>
16422
16423 <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>
16424
16425 <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>
16426
16427 <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>
16428
16429 <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>
16430
16431 <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>
16432
16433 <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>
16434
16435 <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>
16436
16437 <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>
16438
16439 <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>
16440
16441 <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>
16442
16443 <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>
16444
16445 <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>
16446
16447 <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>
16448
16449 <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>
16450
16451 <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>
16452
16453 <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>
16454
16455 <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>
16456
16457 <p>On security:</p>
16458
16459 <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>
16460
16461 <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>
16462
16463 <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>
16464
16465 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
16466
16467 <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>
16468
16469 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
16470
16471 <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>
16472
16473 <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>
16474
16475 <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>
16476
16477 <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>
16478
16479 <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>
16480
16481 <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>
16482
16483 <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>
16484
16485 <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>
16486
16487 <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>
16488
16489 <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>
16490
16491 <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>
16492
16493 <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>
16494
16495 <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>
16496
16497 <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>
16498
16499 <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>
16500
16501 <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>
16502
16503 <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>
16504
16505 <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>
16506
16507 <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>
16508
16509 <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>
16510
16511 <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>
16512
16513 <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>
16514
16515 <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>
16516
16517 <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>
16518
16519 <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>
16520
16521 <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>
16522
16523 <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>
16524
16525 <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>
16526
16527 <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>
16528
16529 <p>Cordially,<br>
16530 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
16531 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
16532 </blockquote>
16533
16534       </div>
16535       <div class="tags">
16536
16537
16538         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>.
16539
16540
16541       </div>
16542     </div>
16543     <div class="padding"></div>
16544
16545     <div class="entry">
16546       <div class="title">
16547         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
16548       </div>
16549       <div class="date">
16550         25th December 2010
16551       </div>
16552       <div class="body">
16553         <p>Half a year ago I
16554 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
16555 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
16556 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
16557 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
16558
16559 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
16560 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
16561 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
16562 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
16563 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
16564 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
16565 got such a great test tool available.</p>
16566
16567       </div>
16568       <div class="tags">
16569
16570
16571         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>.
16572
16573
16574       </div>
16575     </div>
16576     <div class="padding"></div>
16577
16578     <div class="entry">
16579       <div class="title">
16580         <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>
16581       </div>
16582       <div class="date">
16583         22nd December 2010
16584       </div>
16585       <div class="body">
16586         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
16587 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
16588 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
16589 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
16590 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
16591 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
16592 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
16593 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
16594 university.</p>
16595
16596 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
16597 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
16598 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
16599 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
16600 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
16601 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
16602 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
16603 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
16604
16605 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
16606 I perform on a new model.</p>
16607
16608 <ul>
16609
16610 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
16611 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
16612 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
16613
16614 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
16615 installation, X.org is working.</li>
16616
16617 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
16618 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
16619 reported by the program.</li>
16620
16621 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
16622 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
16623 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
16624 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
16625 normally test this by playing
16626 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
16627 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
16628
16629 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
16630 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
16631
16632 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
16633 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
16634
16635 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
16636 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
16637
16638 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
16639 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
16640 few.</li>
16641
16642 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
16643 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
16644 notice this.</li>
16645
16646 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
16647 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
16648 resume.</li>
16649
16650 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
16651 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
16652 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
16653 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
16654 not.</li>
16655
16656 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
16657 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
16658 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
16659 existence.</li>
16660
16661 </ul>
16662
16663 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
16664 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
16665 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
16666 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
16667 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
16668 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
16669 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
16670 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
16671
16672       </div>
16673       <div class="tags">
16674
16675
16676         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>.
16677
16678
16679       </div>
16680     </div>
16681     <div class="padding"></div>
16682
16683     <div class="entry">
16684       <div class="title">
16685         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
16686       </div>
16687       <div class="date">
16688         11th December 2010
16689       </div>
16690       <div class="body">
16691         <p>As I continue to explore
16692 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
16693 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
16694 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
16695
16696 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
16697 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
16698 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
16699 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
16700 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
16701 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
16702 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
16703 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
16704 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
16705 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
16706 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
16707 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
16708 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
16709 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
16710 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
16711 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
16712 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
16713 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
16714 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
16715 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
16716
16717 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
16718 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
16719 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
16720 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
16721 If the Skolelinux foundation
16722 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
16723 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
16724 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
16725 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
16726 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
16727 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
16728 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
16729 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
16730
16731 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
16732 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
16733 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
16734 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
16735 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
16736 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
16737 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
16738 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
16739 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
16740 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
16741 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
16742 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
16743 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
16744 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
16745 currencies.</p>
16746
16747 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
16748 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
16749 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
16750 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
16751 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
16752 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
16753 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
16754 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
16755 BitCoins.  Check out
16756 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
16757 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
16758 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
16759 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
16760 yet.</p>
16761
16762 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
16763 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
16764 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
16765 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
16766 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
16767
16768       </div>
16769       <div class="tags">
16770
16771
16772         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>.
16773
16774
16775       </div>
16776     </div>
16777     <div class="padding"></div>
16778
16779     <div class="entry">
16780       <div class="title">
16781         <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>
16782       </div>
16783       <div class="date">
16784         10th December 2010
16785       </div>
16786       <div class="body">
16787         <p>With this weeks lawless
16788 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
16789 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
16790 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
16791 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
16792 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
16793 A blog post from
16794 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
16795 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
16796 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
16797 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
16798 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
16799 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
16800 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
16801
16802 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
16803 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
16804 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
16805 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
16806 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
16807 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
16808 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
16809 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
16810 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
16811 Debian</a> soon.</p>
16812
16813 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
16814 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
16815 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
16816 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
16817 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
16818 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
16819 you can even get
16820 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
16821 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
16822 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
16823 on the current exchange rates.</p>
16824
16825 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
16826 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
16827 donations to the address
16828 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
16829
16830       </div>
16831       <div class="tags">
16832
16833
16834         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>.
16835
16836
16837       </div>
16838     </div>
16839     <div class="padding"></div>
16840
16841     <div class="entry">
16842       <div class="title">
16843         <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>
16844       </div>
16845       <div class="date">
16846          9th December 2010
16847       </div>
16848       <div class="body">
16849         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
16850 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
16851 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
16852 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
16853 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
16854 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
16855 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
16856 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
16857 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
16858 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
16859 operational.</p>
16860
16861 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
16862 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
16863 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
16864 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
16865 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
16866 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
16867 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
16868
16869       </div>
16870       <div class="tags">
16871
16872
16873         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>.
16874
16875
16876       </div>
16877     </div>
16878     <div class="padding"></div>
16879
16880     <div class="entry">
16881       <div class="title">
16882         <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>
16883       </div>
16884       <div class="date">
16885         29th November 2010
16886       </div>
16887       <div class="body">
16888         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16889 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
16890 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
16891 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
16892 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
16893 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
16894
16895 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
16896 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
16897 will hold its
16898 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
16899 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
16900 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
16901 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
16902 vote this year.</p>
16903
16904       </div>
16905       <div class="tags">
16906
16907
16908         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>.
16909
16910
16911       </div>
16912     </div>
16913     <div class="padding"></div>
16914
16915     <div class="entry">
16916       <div class="title">
16917         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
16918       </div>
16919       <div class="date">
16920         27th November 2010
16921       </div>
16922       <div class="body">
16923         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
16924 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
16925 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
16926 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
16927 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
16928 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
16929 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
16930 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
16931
16932 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
16933 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
16934 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
16935 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
16936 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
16937 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
16938 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
16939 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
16940 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
16941 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
16942 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
16943
16944 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
16945 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
16946 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
16947 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
16948 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
16949 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
16950 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
16951 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
16952 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
16953 what is going on.</p>
16954
16955       </div>
16956       <div class="tags">
16957
16958
16959         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>.
16960
16961
16962       </div>
16963     </div>
16964     <div class="padding"></div>
16965
16966     <div class="entry">
16967       <div class="title">
16968         <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>
16969       </div>
16970       <div class="date">
16971         22nd November 2010
16972       </div>
16973       <div class="body">
16974         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
16975 upgrade testing of the
16976 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
16977 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
16978 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
16979 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
16980
16981 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
16982
16983 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16984
16985 <blockquote><p>
16986   apache2.2-bin
16987   aptdaemon
16988   baobab
16989   binfmt-support
16990   browser-plugin-gnash
16991   cheese-common
16992   cli-common
16993   cups-pk-helper
16994   dmz-cursor-theme
16995   empathy
16996   empathy-common
16997   freedesktop-sound-theme
16998   freeglut3
16999   gconf-defaults-service
17000   gdm-themes
17001   gedit-plugins
17002   geoclue
17003   geoclue-hostip
17004   geoclue-localnet
17005   geoclue-manual
17006   geoclue-yahoo
17007   gnash
17008   gnash-common
17009   gnome
17010   gnome-backgrounds
17011   gnome-cards-data
17012   gnome-codec-install
17013   gnome-core
17014   gnome-desktop-environment
17015   gnome-disk-utility
17016   gnome-screenshot
17017   gnome-search-tool
17018   gnome-session-canberra
17019   gnome-system-log
17020   gnome-themes-extras
17021   gnome-themes-more
17022   gnome-user-share
17023   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
17024   gstreamer0.10-tools
17025   gtk2-engines
17026   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
17027   gtk2-engines-smooth
17028   hamster-applet
17029   libapache2-mod-dnssd
17030   libapr1
17031   libaprutil1
17032   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
17033   libaprutil1-ldap
17034   libart2.0-cil
17035   libboost-date-time1.42.0
17036   libboost-python1.42.0
17037   libboost-thread1.42.0
17038   libchamplain-0.4-0
17039   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
17040   libcheese-gtk18
17041   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
17042   libcryptui0
17043   libdiscid0
17044   libelf1
17045   libepc-1.0-2
17046   libepc-common
17047   libepc-ui-1.0-2
17048   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
17049   libfreerdp0
17050   libgconf2.0-cil
17051   libgdata-common
17052   libgdata7
17053   libgdu-gtk0
17054   libgee2
17055   libgeoclue0
17056   libgexiv2-0
17057   libgif4
17058   libglade2.0-cil
17059   libglib2.0-cil
17060   libgmime2.4-cil
17061   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
17062   libgnome2.24-cil
17063   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
17064   libgpod-common
17065   libgpod4
17066   libgtk2.0-cil
17067   libgtkglext1
17068   libgtksourceview2.0-common
17069   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
17070   libmono-addins0.2-cil
17071   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
17072   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
17073   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
17074   libmono-posix2.0-cil
17075   libmono-security2.0-cil
17076   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
17077   libmono-system2.0-cil
17078   libmtp8
17079   libmusicbrainz3-6
17080   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
17081   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
17082   libopal3.6.8
17083   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
17084   libpt2.6.7
17085   libpython2.6
17086   librpm1
17087   librpmio1
17088   libsdl1.2debian
17089   libsrtp0
17090   libssh-4
17091   libtelepathy-farsight0
17092   libtelepathy-glib0
17093   libtidy-0.99-0
17094   media-player-info
17095   mesa-utils
17096   mono-2.0-gac
17097   mono-gac
17098   mono-runtime
17099   nautilus-sendto
17100   nautilus-sendto-empathy
17101   p7zip-full
17102   pkg-config
17103   python-aptdaemon
17104   python-aptdaemon-gtk
17105   python-axiom
17106   python-beautifulsoup
17107   python-bugbuddy
17108   python-clientform
17109   python-coherence
17110   python-configobj
17111   python-crypto
17112   python-cupshelpers
17113   python-elementtree
17114   python-epsilon
17115   python-evolution
17116   python-feedparser
17117   python-gdata
17118   python-gdbm
17119   python-gst0.10
17120   python-gtkglext1
17121   python-gtksourceview2
17122   python-httplib2
17123   python-louie
17124   python-mako
17125   python-markupsafe
17126   python-mechanize
17127   python-nevow
17128   python-notify
17129   python-opengl
17130   python-openssl
17131   python-pam
17132   python-pkg-resources
17133   python-pyasn1
17134   python-pysqlite2
17135   python-rdflib
17136   python-serial
17137   python-tagpy
17138   python-twisted-bin
17139   python-twisted-conch
17140   python-twisted-core
17141   python-twisted-web
17142   python-utidylib
17143   python-webkit
17144   python-xdg
17145   python-zope.interface
17146   remmina
17147   remmina-plugin-data
17148   remmina-plugin-rdp
17149   remmina-plugin-vnc
17150   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
17151   rhythmbox-plugins
17152   rpm-common
17153   rpm2cpio
17154   seahorse-plugins
17155   shotwell
17156   software-center
17157   system-config-printer-udev
17158   telepathy-gabble
17159   telepathy-mission-control-5
17160   telepathy-salut
17161   tomboy
17162   totem
17163   totem-coherence
17164   totem-mozilla
17165   totem-plugins
17166   transmission-common
17167   xdg-user-dirs
17168   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
17169   xserver-xephyr
17170 </p></blockquote>
17171
17172 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
17173
17174 <blockquote><p>
17175   cheese
17176   ekiga
17177   eog
17178   epiphany-extensions
17179   evolution-exchange
17180   fast-user-switch-applet
17181   file-roller
17182   gcalctool
17183   gconf-editor
17184   gdm
17185   gedit
17186   gedit-common
17187   gnome-games
17188   gnome-games-data
17189   gnome-nettool
17190   gnome-system-tools
17191   gnome-themes
17192   gnuchess
17193   gucharmap
17194   guile-1.8-libs
17195   libavahi-ui0
17196   libdmx1
17197   libgalago3
17198   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
17199   libgtksourceview2.0-0
17200   liblircclient0
17201   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
17202   libspeexdsp1
17203   libsvga1
17204   rhythmbox
17205   seahorse
17206   sound-juicer
17207   system-config-printer
17208   totem-common
17209   transmission-gtk
17210   vinagre
17211   vino
17212 </p></blockquote>
17213
17214 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17215
17216 <blockquote><p>
17217   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
17218 </p></blockquote>
17219
17220 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17221
17222 <blockquote><p>
17223 [nothing]
17224 </p></blockquote>
17225
17226 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
17227
17228 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
17229
17230 <blockquote><p>
17231   ksmserver
17232 </p></blockquote>
17233
17234 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
17235
17236 <blockquote><p>
17237   kwin
17238   network-manager-kde
17239 </p></blockquote>
17240
17241 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17242
17243 <blockquote><p>
17244   arts
17245   dolphin
17246   freespacenotifier
17247   google-gadgets-gst
17248   google-gadgets-xul
17249   kappfinder
17250   kcalc
17251   kcharselect
17252   kde-core
17253   kde-plasma-desktop
17254   kde-standard
17255   kde-window-manager
17256   kdeartwork
17257   kdeartwork-emoticons
17258   kdeartwork-style
17259   kdeartwork-theme-icon
17260   kdebase
17261   kdebase-apps
17262   kdebase-workspace
17263   kdebase-workspace-bin
17264   kdebase-workspace-data
17265   kdeeject
17266   kdelibs
17267   kdeplasma-addons
17268   kdeutils
17269   kdewallpapers
17270   kdf
17271   kfloppy
17272   kgpg
17273   khelpcenter4
17274   kinfocenter
17275   konq-plugins-l10n
17276   konqueror-nsplugins
17277   kscreensaver
17278   kscreensaver-xsavers
17279   ktimer
17280   kwrite
17281   libgle3
17282   libkde4-ruby1.8
17283   libkonq5
17284   libkonq5-templates
17285   libnetpbm10
17286   libplasma-ruby
17287   libplasma-ruby1.8
17288   libqt4-ruby1.8
17289   marble-data
17290   marble-plugins
17291   netpbm
17292   nuvola-icon-theme
17293   plasma-dataengines-workspace
17294   plasma-desktop
17295   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
17296   plasma-runners-addons
17297   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
17298   plasma-scriptengine-python
17299   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
17300   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
17301   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
17302   plasma-scriptengines
17303   plasma-wallpapers-addons
17304   plasma-widget-folderview
17305   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
17306   ruby
17307   sweeper
17308   update-notifier-kde
17309   xscreensaver-data-extra
17310   xscreensaver-gl
17311   xscreensaver-gl-extra
17312   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
17313 </p></blockquote>
17314
17315 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17316
17317 <blockquote><p>
17318   ark
17319   google-gadgets-common
17320   google-gadgets-qt
17321   htdig
17322   kate
17323   kdebase-bin
17324   kdebase-data
17325   kdepasswd
17326   kfind
17327   klipper
17328   konq-plugins
17329   konqueror
17330   ksysguard
17331   ksysguardd
17332   libarchive1
17333   libcln6
17334   libeet1
17335   libeina-svn-06
17336   libggadget-1.0-0b
17337   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
17338   libgps19
17339   libkdecorations4
17340   libkephal4
17341   libkonq4
17342   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
17343   libkscreensaver5
17344   libksgrd4
17345   libksignalplotter4
17346   libkunitconversion4
17347   libkwineffects1a
17348   libmarblewidget4
17349   libntrack-qt4-1
17350   libntrack0
17351   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
17352   libplasmaclock4a
17353   libplasmagenericshell4
17354   libprocesscore4a
17355   libprocessui4a
17356   libqalculate5
17357   libqedje0a
17358   libqtruby4shared2
17359   libqzion0a
17360   libruby1.8
17361   libscim8c2a
17362   libsmokekdecore4-3
17363   libsmokekdeui4-3
17364   libsmokekfile3
17365   libsmokekhtml3
17366   libsmokekio3
17367   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
17368   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
17369   libsmokekparts3
17370   libsmokektexteditor3
17371   libsmokekutils3
17372   libsmokenepomuk3
17373   libsmokephonon3
17374   libsmokeplasma3
17375   libsmokeqtcore4-3
17376   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
17377   libsmokeqtgui4-3
17378   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
17379   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
17380   libsmokeqtscript4-3
17381   libsmokeqtsql4-3
17382   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
17383   libsmokeqttest4-3
17384   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
17385   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
17386   libsmokeqtxml4-3
17387   libsmokesolid3
17388   libsmokesoprano3
17389   libtaskmanager4a
17390   libtidy-0.99-0
17391   libweather-ion4a
17392   libxklavier16
17393   libxxf86misc1
17394   okteta
17395   oxygencursors
17396   plasma-dataengines-addons
17397   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
17398   plasma-widget-lancelot
17399   plasma-widgets-addons
17400   plasma-widgets-workspace
17401   polkit-kde-1
17402   ruby1.8
17403   systemsettings
17404   update-notifier-common
17405 </p></blockquote>
17406
17407 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
17408 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
17409 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
17410 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
17411
17412       </div>
17413       <div class="tags">
17414
17415
17416         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>.
17417
17418
17419       </div>
17420     </div>
17421     <div class="padding"></div>
17422
17423     <div class="entry">
17424       <div class="title">
17425         <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>
17426       </div>
17427       <div class="date">
17428         22nd November 2010
17429       </div>
17430       <div class="body">
17431         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
17432 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
17433 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
17434 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
17435 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
17436 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
17437 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
17438 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
17439 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
17440
17441 <p>I found
17442 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
17443 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
17444 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
17445 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
17446 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
17447 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
17448
17449 <pre>
17450 #!/bin/sh
17451
17452 # Based on
17453 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
17454
17455 set -e
17456 set -x
17457
17458 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
17459     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
17460     exit 1
17461 else
17462     host="$1"
17463 fi
17464
17465 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
17466     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
17467     exit 1
17468 fi
17469
17470 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
17471 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
17472 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
17473 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
17474
17475 img=$host.img
17476 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
17477 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
17478
17479 parted $img mklabel msdos
17480 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
17481 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
17482 parted $img set 1 boot on
17483
17484 modprobe dm-mod
17485 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
17486 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
17487
17488 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
17489 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
17490 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
17491
17492 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
17493 losetup -d /dev/loop0
17494 </pre>
17495
17496 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
17497 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
17498
17499 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
17500 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
17501 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
17502 seem to work just fine.</p>
17503
17504       </div>
17505       <div class="tags">
17506
17507
17508         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>.
17509
17510
17511       </div>
17512     </div>
17513     <div class="padding"></div>
17514
17515     <div class="entry">
17516       <div class="title">
17517         <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>
17518       </div>
17519       <div class="date">
17520         20th November 2010
17521       </div>
17522       <div class="body">
17523         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
17524 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
17525 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
17526 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
17527
17528 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
17529 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
17530 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
17531
17532 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
17533
17534 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
17535
17536 <blockquote><p>
17537   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
17538   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
17539   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
17540   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
17541   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
17542   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
17543   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
17544   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
17545   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
17546   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
17547   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
17548   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
17549   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
17550   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
17551   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
17552   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
17553   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
17554   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
17555   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
17556   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
17557   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
17558   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
17559   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
17560   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
17561   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
17562   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
17563   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
17564   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
17565   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
17566   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
17567   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
17568   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
17569   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
17570   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
17571   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
17572   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
17573   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
17574   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
17575   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
17576   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
17577   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
17578   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
17579   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
17580   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
17581   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
17582   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
17583   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
17584   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
17585   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
17586   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
17587   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
17588   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
17589   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
17590   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
17591   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
17592   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
17593   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
17594   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
17595   zip
17596 </p></blockquote>
17597
17598 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
17599
17600 <blockquote><p>
17601   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
17602   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
17603   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
17604   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
17605   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
17606   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
17607   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
17608   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
17609   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
17610   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
17611   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
17612   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
17613   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
17614   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
17615   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
17616   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
17617   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
17618   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
17619   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
17620   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
17621   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
17622   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
17623   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
17624   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
17625   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
17626   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
17627   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
17628   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
17629   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
17630 </p></blockquote>
17631
17632 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17633
17634 <blockquote><p>
17635   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
17636 </p></blockquote>
17637
17638 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17639
17640 <blockquote><p>
17641 [nothing]
17642 </p></blockquote>
17643
17644 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
17645
17646 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
17647
17648 <blockquote><p>
17649   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
17650   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
17651   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
17652   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
17653   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
17654   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
17655   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
17656   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
17657   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
17658   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
17659   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
17660   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
17661   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
17662   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
17663   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
17664   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
17665   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
17666   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
17667   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
17668   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
17669   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
17670   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
17671   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
17672   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
17673   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
17674   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
17675   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
17676   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
17677   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
17678   ttf-sazanami-gothic
17679 </p></blockquote>
17680
17681 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
17682
17683 <blockquote><p>
17684   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
17685   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
17686   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
17687   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
17688   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
17689   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
17690   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
17691   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
17692   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
17693   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
17694   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
17695   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
17696   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
17697   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
17698   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
17699   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
17700   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
17701   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
17702   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
17703   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
17704   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
17705   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
17706   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
17707   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
17708   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
17709   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
17710   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
17711   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
17712   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
17713   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
17714   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
17715   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
17716   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
17717 </p></blockquote>
17718
17719 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17720
17721 <blockquote><p>
17722   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
17723   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
17724   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
17725   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
17726   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
17727   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
17728   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
17729 </p></blockquote>
17730
17731 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17732
17733 <blockquote><p>
17734   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
17735 </p></blockquote>
17736
17737       </div>
17738       <div class="tags">
17739
17740
17741         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>.
17742
17743
17744       </div>
17745     </div>
17746     <div class="padding"></div>
17747
17748     <div class="entry">
17749       <div class="title">
17750         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
17751       </div>
17752       <div class="date">
17753         20th November 2010
17754       </div>
17755       <div class="body">
17756         <p>Answering
17757 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
17758 call from the Gnash project</a> for
17759 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
17760 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
17761 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
17762 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
17763 releases out more often.</p>
17764
17765 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
17766 I have considered setting up a <a
17767 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
17768 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
17769 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
17770 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
17771 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
17772 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
17773 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
17774 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
17775 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
17776 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
17777 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
17778 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
17779
17780       </div>
17781       <div class="tags">
17782
17783
17784         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>.
17785
17786
17787       </div>
17788     </div>
17789     <div class="padding"></div>
17790
17791     <div class="entry">
17792       <div class="title">
17793         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
17794       </div>
17795       <div class="date">
17796          9th November 2010
17797       </div>
17798       <div class="body">
17799         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
17800
17801 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
17802 3D linked in from
17803 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
17804 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
17805
17806       </div>
17807       <div class="tags">
17808
17809
17810         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>.
17811
17812
17813       </div>
17814     </div>
17815     <div class="padding"></div>
17816
17817     <div class="entry">
17818       <div class="title">
17819         <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>
17820       </div>
17821       <div class="date">
17822          7th November 2010
17823       </div>
17824       <div class="body">
17825         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
17826 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
17827 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
17828 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
17829 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
17830 working using this DVD.</p>
17831
17832 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
17833 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
17834 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
17835 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
17836 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
17837 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
17838 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
17839
17840 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
17841 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
17842 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
17843 Debian archive.</p>
17844
17845 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
17846 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
17847 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
17848 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
17849 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
17850 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
17851 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
17852 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
17853 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
17854 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
17855 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
17856 free X driver should work.</p>
17857
17858 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
17859 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
17860 DVD more useful again.</p>
17861
17862       </div>
17863       <div class="tags">
17864
17865
17866         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>.
17867
17868
17869       </div>
17870     </div>
17871     <div class="padding"></div>
17872
17873     <div class="entry">
17874       <div class="title">
17875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
17876       </div>
17877       <div class="date">
17878         24th October 2010
17879       </div>
17880       <div class="body">
17881         <p>Some updates.</p>
17882
17883 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
17884 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
17885 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
17886 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
17887 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
17888 :)</p>
17889
17890 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
17891 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
17892 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
17893 It is called
17894 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
17895 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
17896 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
17897 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
17898 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
17899 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
17900
17901 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
17902 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
17903 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
17904 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
17905 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
17906 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
17907 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
17908 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
17909 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
17910 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
17911
17912       </div>
17913       <div class="tags">
17914
17915
17916         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>.
17917
17918
17919       </div>
17920     </div>
17921     <div class="padding"></div>
17922
17923     <div class="entry">
17924       <div class="title">
17925         <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>
17926       </div>
17927       <div class="date">
17928         19th October 2010
17929       </div>
17930       <div class="body">
17931         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
17932 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
17933 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
17934 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
17935 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
17936 AVM2 flash files.</p>
17937
17938 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
17939 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
17940 following text:</P>
17941
17942 <p><blockquote>
17943
17944   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
17945   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
17946
17947   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
17948
17949   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
17950
17951   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
17952   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
17953   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
17954   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
17955   days. The project web page is available from
17956   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
17957   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
17958   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
17959
17960   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
17961   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
17962   to get this to happen.</p>
17963
17964   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
17965   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
17966
17967 </blockquote></p>
17968
17969 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
17970 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
17971 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
17972 :)</p>
17973
17974       </div>
17975       <div class="tags">
17976
17977
17978         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>.
17979
17980
17981       </div>
17982     </div>
17983     <div class="padding"></div>
17984
17985     <div class="entry">
17986       <div class="title">
17987         <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>
17988       </div>
17989       <div class="date">
17990          9th October 2010
17991       </div>
17992       <div class="body">
17993         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
17994 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
17995 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
17996 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
17997 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
17998 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
17999 robots.</p>
18000
18001 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
18002 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
18003 a few less important features too.</p>
18004
18005 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
18006 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
18007 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
18008 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
18009
18010 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
18011 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
18012 source or binary package:</p>
18013
18014 <p><ul>
18015 <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>
18016 <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>
18017 <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>
18018 </ul></p>
18019
18020 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
18021 please let me know.</p>
18022
18023       </div>
18024       <div class="tags">
18025
18026
18027         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>.
18028
18029
18030       </div>
18031     </div>
18032     <div class="padding"></div>
18033
18034     <div class="entry">
18035       <div class="title">
18036         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
18037       </div>
18038       <div class="date">
18039          3rd October 2010
18040       </div>
18041       <div class="body">
18042         <p><ul>
18043
18044 <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
18045 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
18046
18047 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
18048 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
18049 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
18050
18051 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
18052 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
18053 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
18054 simple setup.
18055
18056 </ul></p>
18057
18058       </div>
18059       <div class="tags">
18060
18061
18062         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>.
18063
18064
18065       </div>
18066     </div>
18067     <div class="padding"></div>
18068
18069     <div class="entry">
18070       <div class="title">
18071         <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>
18072       </div>
18073       <div class="date">
18074          9th September 2010
18075       </div>
18076       <div class="body">
18077         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
18078 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
18079 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
18080 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
18081 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
18082 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
18083 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
18084 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
18085 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
18086
18087 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
18088 written:</p>
18089
18090 <blockquote>
18091 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
18092 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
18093 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
18094 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
18095 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
18096
18097 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
18098 standard.</p>
18099 </blockquote>
18100
18101 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
18102 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
18103 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
18104 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
18105
18106 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
18107 read
18108 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
18109 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
18110 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
18111 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
18112 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
18113 the issue.  The solution is to support the
18114 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
18115 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
18116 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
18117
18118       </div>
18119       <div class="tags">
18120
18121
18122         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>.
18123
18124
18125       </div>
18126     </div>
18127     <div class="padding"></div>
18128
18129     <div class="entry">
18130       <div class="title">
18131         <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>
18132       </div>
18133       <div class="date">
18134          4th September 2010
18135       </div>
18136       <div class="body">
18137         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
18138 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
18139 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
18140 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
18141 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
18142 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
18143 installed.</p>
18144
18145 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
18146 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
18147 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
18148 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
18149 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
18150 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
18151 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
18152 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
18153 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
18154
18155 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
18156 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
18157 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
18158 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
18159 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
18160 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
18161 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
18162 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
18163 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
18164 pages they want to visit.</p>
18165
18166 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
18167 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
18168 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
18169 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
18170 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
18171 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
18172 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
18173 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
18174 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
18175 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
18176 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
18177
18178       </div>
18179       <div class="tags">
18180
18181
18182         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>.
18183
18184
18185       </div>
18186     </div>
18187     <div class="padding"></div>
18188
18189     <div class="entry">
18190       <div class="title">
18191         <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>
18192       </div>
18193       <div class="date">
18194          1st September 2010
18195       </div>
18196       <div class="body">
18197         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
18198 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
18199 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
18200 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
18201 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
18202 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
18203 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
18204 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
18205 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
18206 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
18207 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
18208 drive around.</p>
18209
18210 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
18211 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
18212
18213 <p><pre>
18214 use Spykee;
18215 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
18216 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
18217 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
18218 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
18219 $spykee->left();
18220 sleep 2;
18221 $spykee->right();
18222 sleep 2;
18223 $spykee->forward();
18224 sleep 2;
18225 $spykee->back();
18226 sleep 2;
18227 $spykee->stop();
18228 </pre></p>
18229
18230 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
18231 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
18232 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
18233 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
18234 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
18235 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
18236 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
18237 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
18238 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
18239 going. :).</p>
18240
18241 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
18242 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
18243 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
18244 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
18245
18246       </div>
18247       <div class="tags">
18248
18249
18250         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>.
18251
18252
18253       </div>
18254     </div>
18255     <div class="padding"></div>
18256
18257     <div class="entry">
18258       <div class="title">
18259         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
18260       </div>
18261       <div class="date">
18262         30th August 2010
18263       </div>
18264       <div class="body">
18265         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
18266 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
18267 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
18268 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
18269 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
18270 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
18271 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
18272
18273 <pre>
18274 % ln foo bar
18275 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
18276 %
18277 </pre>
18278
18279 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
18280 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
18281 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
18282 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
18283 nevertheless. :)</p>
18284
18285 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
18286 git from
18287 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
18288
18289       </div>
18290       <div class="tags">
18291
18292
18293         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>.
18294
18295
18296       </div>
18297     </div>
18298     <div class="padding"></div>
18299
18300     <div class="entry">
18301       <div class="title">
18302         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
18303       </div>
18304       <div class="date">
18305         26th August 2010
18306       </div>
18307       <div class="body">
18308         <p>My file system sematics program
18309 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
18310 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
18311 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
18312 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
18313 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
18314 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
18315 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
18316 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
18317 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
18318 script:</p>
18319
18320 <pre>
18321 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
18322   mode_t retval = 0;
18323   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
18324   if (-1 != fd) {
18325     unlink(name);
18326     struct stat statbuf;
18327     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
18328       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
18329     }
18330     close(fd);
18331   }
18332   return retval;
18333 }
18334
18335 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
18336 int test_umask(void) {
18337   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
18338
18339   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
18340   mode_t newmode;
18341   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
18342     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
18343            newmode);
18344   }
18345   umask(007);
18346   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
18347     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
18348            newmode);
18349   }
18350
18351   umask (orig_umask);
18352   return 0;
18353 }
18354
18355 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
18356   [...]
18357   test_umask();
18358   return 0;
18359 }
18360 </pre>
18361
18362 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
18363
18364 <pre>
18365 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18366 info: testing symlink creation
18367 info: testing subdirectory creation
18368 info: testing fcntl locking
18369   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18370   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18371   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18372   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18373   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18374   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18375 info: testing umask effect on file creation
18376 </pre>
18377
18378 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
18379 result:</p>
18380
18381 <pre>
18382 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18383 info: testing symlink creation
18384 info: testing subdirectory creation
18385 info: testing fcntl locking
18386   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18387   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18388   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18389   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18390   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18391   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18392 info: testing umask effect on file creation
18393   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
18394   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
18395 </pre>
18396
18397 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
18398 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
18399 directory.</p>
18400
18401 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
18402 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
18403
18404 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
18405 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
18406 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
18407
18408       </div>
18409       <div class="tags">
18410
18411
18412         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>.
18413
18414
18415       </div>
18416     </div>
18417     <div class="padding"></div>
18418
18419     <div class="entry">
18420       <div class="title">
18421         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
18422       </div>
18423       <div class="date">
18424         15th August 2010
18425       </div>
18426       <div class="body">
18427         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
18428 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
18429 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
18430 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
18431 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
18432 long time.</p>
18433
18434       </div>
18435       <div class="tags">
18436
18437
18438         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>.
18439
18440
18441       </div>
18442     </div>
18443     <div class="padding"></div>
18444
18445     <div class="entry">
18446       <div class="title">
18447         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
18448       </div>
18449       <div class="date">
18450          9th August 2010
18451       </div>
18452       <div class="body">
18453         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
18454 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
18455 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
18456 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
18457 generated configuration.</p>
18458
18459 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
18460 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
18461 without any manual configuration.</p>
18462
18463 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
18464 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
18465 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
18466 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
18467 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
18468 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
18469 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
18470 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
18471 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
18472 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
18473 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
18474 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
18475 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
18476 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
18477 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
18478 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
18479 use.</p>
18480
18481 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
18482 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
18483 working properly out of the box:</p>
18484
18485 <ul>
18486 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
18487 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
18488 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
18489 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
18490 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
18491 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
18492 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
18493 </ul>
18494
18495 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
18496
18497 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
18498 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
18499 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
18500 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
18501 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
18502
18503 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
18504 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
18505 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
18506 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
18507 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
18508 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
18509 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
18510 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
18511
18512 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
18513 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
18514 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
18515 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
18516 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
18517 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
18518 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
18519 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
18520 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
18521 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
18522 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
18523 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
18524 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
18525 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
18526 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
18527 current DNS domain is used.</p>
18528
18529 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
18530 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
18531 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
18532 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
18533 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
18534 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
18535 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
18536 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
18537 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
18538 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
18539 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
18540 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
18541 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
18542
18543 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
18544 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
18545 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
18546 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
18547 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
18548 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
18549 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
18550 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
18551 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
18552 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
18553 do for now. :)</p>
18554
18555 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
18556 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
18557 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
18558 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
18559 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
18560 yet.</p>
18561
18562 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
18563 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18564
18565 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
18566 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
18567 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
18568 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
18569
18570       </div>
18571       <div class="tags">
18572
18573
18574         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>.
18575
18576
18577       </div>
18578     </div>
18579     <div class="padding"></div>
18580
18581     <div class="entry">
18582       <div class="title">
18583         <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>
18584       </div>
18585       <div class="date">
18586          8th August 2010
18587       </div>
18588       <div class="body">
18589         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
18590 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
18591 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
18592 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
18593 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
18594 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
18595 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
18596
18597 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
18598 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
18599 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
18600 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
18601 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
18602 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
18603 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
18604
18605 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
18606 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
18607 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
18608 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
18609 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
18610
18611 <pre>
18612 /*
18613  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
18614  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
18615  * directory.
18616  * License: GPL v2 or later
18617  *
18618  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
18619  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
18620 */
18621
18622 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
18623 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
18624 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
18625
18626 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
18627
18628 #include &lt;errno.h>
18629 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
18630 #include &lt;stdio.h>
18631 #include &lt;string.h>
18632 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
18633 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
18634 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
18635 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
18636 #include &lt;unistd.h>
18637
18638 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
18639 /*
18640  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
18641  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
18642  * below.
18643  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
18644  */
18645 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
18646 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
18647   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
18648 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
18649   char *zErrMsg;
18650   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
18651   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
18652   unlink(name);
18653   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
18654   if( rc ){
18655     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
18656     sqlite3_close(db);
18657     return -1;
18658   }
18659
18660   /* create tables */
18661   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
18662   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
18663     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
18664     sqlite3_close(db);
18665     return -1;
18666   }
18667   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
18668   sqlite3_close(db);
18669   return 0;
18670 }
18671 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
18672
18673 /*
18674  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
18675  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
18676  * done in the sqlite3 library.
18677  * See also
18678  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
18679  * POSIX specification
18680  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
18681  */
18682 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
18683   struct flock fl;
18684   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
18685   unlink(name);
18686   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
18687   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
18688
18689   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
18690   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
18691   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
18692   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18693   fl.l_len    = 1;
18694   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
18695   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18696
18697   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
18698   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
18699   fl.l_len    = 510;
18700   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
18701   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18702
18703   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
18704   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18705   fl.l_len    = 1;
18706   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
18707   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18708
18709   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
18710   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18711   fl.l_len    = 1;
18712   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
18713   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18714
18715   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
18716   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
18717   fl.l_len    = 510;
18718   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18719
18720   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
18721   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18722   fl.l_len    = 2;
18723   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
18724   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18725
18726   close(fd);
18727   return 0;
18728 }
18729
18730 /*
18731  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
18732  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
18733  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
18734  * slowing down file operations.
18735  */
18736 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
18737 #define LEVELS 5
18738   char *path = strdup("test");
18739   char *dirs[LEVELS];
18740   int level;
18741   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
18742   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
18743     char *newpath = NULL;
18744     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
18745       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
18746              path, strerror(errno));
18747       break;
18748     }
18749     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
18750     free(path);
18751     path = newpath;
18752   }
18753   return 0;
18754 }
18755
18756 /*
18757  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
18758  * KDE.
18759  */
18760 int test_symlinks(void) {
18761   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
18762   unlink("symlink");
18763   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
18764     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
18765   return 0;
18766 }
18767
18768 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
18769   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
18770   test_symlinks();
18771   test_subdirectory_creation();
18772 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
18773   test_sqlite_open();
18774 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
18775   test_gcompris_locking();
18776   return 0;
18777 }
18778 </pre>
18779
18780 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
18781 this:</p>
18782
18783 <pre>
18784 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18785 info: testing symlink creation
18786 info: testing subdirectory creation
18787 info: sqlite worked
18788 info: testing fcntl locking
18789   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18790   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18791   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18792   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18793   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18794   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18795 </pre>
18796
18797 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
18798 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
18799 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
18800 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
18801 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
18802 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
18803 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
18804 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
18805
18806 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
18807 it. :)</p>
18808
18809 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
18810 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
18811 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
18812
18813       </div>
18814       <div class="tags">
18815
18816
18817         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>.
18818
18819
18820       </div>
18821     </div>
18822     <div class="padding"></div>
18823
18824     <div class="entry">
18825       <div class="title">
18826         <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>
18827       </div>
18828       <div class="date">
18829          7th August 2010
18830       </div>
18831       <div class="body">
18832         <p>A few days ago, I
18833 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
18834 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
18835 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
18836 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
18837 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
18838 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
18839 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
18840 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
18841 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
18842
18843 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
18844 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
18845 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
18846 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
18847 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
18848 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
18849 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
18850 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
18851 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
18852 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
18853 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
18854 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
18855 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
18856 gave it a IP address.</p>
18857
18858 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
18859 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
18860 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
18861 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
18862 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
18863 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
18864 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
18865 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
18866
18867 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
18868 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
18869 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
18870 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
18871 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
18872 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
18873
18874 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
18875 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
18876 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
18877 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
18878 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
18879 with UID and GID values.</p>
18880
18881 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
18882 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18883
18884       </div>
18885       <div class="tags">
18886
18887
18888         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>.
18889
18890
18891       </div>
18892     </div>
18893     <div class="padding"></div>
18894
18895     <div class="entry">
18896       <div class="title">
18897         <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>
18898       </div>
18899       <div class="date">
18900          3rd August 2010
18901       </div>
18902       <div class="body">
18903         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
18904 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
18905 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
18906 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
18907 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
18908 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
18909 servers.</p>
18910
18911 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
18912 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
18913 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
18914 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
18915 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
18916 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
18917 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
18918 .uio.no.</p>
18919
18920 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
18921 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
18922 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
18923 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
18924 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
18925 university servers.</p>
18926
18927 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
18928 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
18929 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
18930 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
18931 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
18932 uses.</p>
18933
18934       </div>
18935       <div class="tags">
18936
18937
18938         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>.
18939
18940
18941       </div>
18942     </div>
18943     <div class="padding"></div>
18944
18945     <div class="entry">
18946       <div class="title">
18947         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
18948       </div>
18949       <div class="date">
18950         27th July 2010
18951       </div>
18952       <div class="body">
18953         <p>I discovered this while doing
18954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
18955 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
18956 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
18957 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
18958 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
18959
18960 <p>An example is from todays
18961 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
18962 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
18963 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
18964 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
18965 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
18966 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
18967 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
18968
18969 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
18970
18971 <blockquote><pre>
18972 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
18973  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
18974   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
18975 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
18976  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
18977 </pre></blockquote>
18978
18979 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
18980 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
18981 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
18982 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
18983 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
18984 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
18985 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
18986 of dependency loops.</p>
18987
18988 <p>Thanks to
18989 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
18990 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
18991 dependencies
18992 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
18993 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
18994
18995 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
18996 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
18997 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
18998 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
18999 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
19000 it.</p>
19001
19002       </div>
19003       <div class="tags">
19004
19005
19006         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>.
19007
19008
19009       </div>
19010     </div>
19011     <div class="padding"></div>
19012
19013     <div class="entry">
19014       <div class="title">
19015         <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>
19016       </div>
19017       <div class="date">
19018         27th July 2010
19019       </div>
19020       <div class="body">
19021         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
19022 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
19023 completed.</p>
19024
19025 <blockquote>
19026 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
19027 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
19028 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
19029 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
19030 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
19031 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
19032 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
19033 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
19034
19035 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
19036 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
19037 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
19038
19039 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
19040 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
19041 much.</p>
19042
19043 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
19044
19045 <ul>
19046 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
19047 <ul>
19048   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
19049          combination with some new artwork
19050   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
19051   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
19052   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
19053   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
19054   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
19055   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
19056   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
19057   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
19058   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
19059 </ul></li>
19060 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
19061     Enabled for:
19062 <ul>
19063   <li>PAM
19064   <li>LDAP
19065   <li>IMAP
19066   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
19067 </ul>
19068 </li>
19069 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
19070 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
19071     fetched from LDAP.</li>
19072 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
19073 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
19074 </ul>
19075 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
19076
19077 <ul>
19078 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
19079     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
19080     for testing.</li>
19081 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
19082     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
19083     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
19084 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
19085 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
19086 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
19087 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
19088     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
19089 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
19090     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
19091     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
19092 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
19093     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
19094     and help out with translations.</li>
19095 </ul>
19096
19097 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
19098
19099 <ul>
19100 <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>
19101 <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>
19102 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
19103 </ul>
19104 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
19105
19106 <ul>
19107 <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>
19108 <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>
19109 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
19110 </ul>
19111
19112 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
19113 get closer to the final release.</p>
19114
19115 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
19116
19117 <ul>
19118 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
19119 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
19120 </ul>
19121
19122 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
19123 <ul>
19124 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
19125 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
19126 </ul>
19127 <p>How to report bugs:
19128 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
19129
19130 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
19131 </blockquote>
19132
19133       </div>
19134       <div class="tags">
19135
19136
19137         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>.
19138
19139
19140       </div>
19141     </div>
19142     <div class="padding"></div>
19143
19144     <div class="entry">
19145       <div class="title">
19146         <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>
19147       </div>
19148       <div class="date">
19149         25th July 2010
19150       </div>
19151       <div class="body">
19152         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
19153 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
19154 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
19155 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
19156 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
19157
19158 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
19159 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
19160 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
19161 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
19162 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
19163 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
19164 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
19165
19166 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
19167 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
19168 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
19169 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
19170 up. :)</p>
19171
19172 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
19173 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
19174 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
19175
19176 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
19177 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
19178 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
19179 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
19180 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
19181 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
19182 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
19183 release another day.</p>
19184
19185 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
19186 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19187
19188       </div>
19189       <div class="tags">
19190
19191
19192         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>.
19193
19194
19195       </div>
19196     </div>
19197     <div class="padding"></div>
19198
19199     <div class="entry">
19200       <div class="title">
19201         <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>
19202       </div>
19203       <div class="date">
19204         18th July 2010
19205       </div>
19206       <div class="body">
19207         <p>Thanks to
19208 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
19209 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
19210 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
19211 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
19212 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
19213 only available from the development server, until more experience is
19214 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
19215
19216 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
19217 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
19218 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
19219 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
19220 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
19221 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
19222 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
19223
19224       </div>
19225       <div class="tags">
19226
19227
19228         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>.
19229
19230
19231       </div>
19232     </div>
19233     <div class="padding"></div>
19234
19235     <div class="entry">
19236       <div class="title">
19237         <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>
19238       </div>
19239       <div class="date">
19240         17th July 2010
19241       </div>
19242       <div class="body">
19243         <p>This is a
19244 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
19245 on my
19246 <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
19247 work</a> on
19248 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
19249 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
19250
19251 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
19252 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
19253 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
19254 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
19255
19256 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
19257 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
19258 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
19259
19260 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
19261
19262 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
19263 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
19264 the web.
19265
19266 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
19267 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
19268 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
19269 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
19270 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
19271 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
19272
19273 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
19274 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
19275 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
19276 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
19277 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
19278 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
19279 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
19280 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
19281 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
19282 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
19283 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
19284 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
19285 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
19286 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
19287 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
19288 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
19289
19290 <blockquote><pre>
19291 ldapsearch -h ldap \
19292   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
19293   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
19294   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
19295   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
19296   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
19297   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
19298
19299 ldapsearch -h ldap \
19300   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
19301   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
19302   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
19303   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
19304   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
19305 </pre></blockquote>
19306
19307 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
19308 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
19309 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
19310 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19311 also exist.</p>
19312
19313 <blockquote><pre>
19314 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19315 objectclass: top
19316 objectclass: dnsdomain
19317 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19318 dc: tjener
19319 arecord: 10.0.2.2
19320 associateddomain: tjener.intern
19321
19322 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19323 objectclass: top
19324 objectclass: dnsdomain2
19325 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19326 dc: 2
19327 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
19328 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
19329 </pre></blockquote>
19330
19331 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
19332 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
19333 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
19334 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
19335 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
19336 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
19337 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
19338 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
19339 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
19340 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
19341 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
19342 instead.</p>
19343
19344 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
19345 like this:</p>
19346
19347 <blockquote><pre>
19348 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
19349   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
19350   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
19351   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
19352   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
19353   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
19354
19355 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
19356   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
19357 </pre></blockquote>
19358
19359 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
19360 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
19361 reverse lookups.</p>
19362
19363 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
19364 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
19365 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
19366 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
19367
19368 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
19369 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
19370 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
19371
19372 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
19373 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
19374 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
19375 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
19376 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
19377
19378 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
19379 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
19380 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
19381 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
19382 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
19383
19384 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
19385 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
19386 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
19387 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
19388 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
19389 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
19390
19391 <blockquote><pre>
19392 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
19393     SUP top
19394     AUXILIARY
19395     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
19396           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
19397           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
19398           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
19399           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
19400     ))
19401 </pre></blockquote>
19402
19403 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
19404 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
19405 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
19406 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
19407 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
19408 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
19409
19410 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
19411
19412 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
19413 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
19414 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
19415 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
19416 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
19417
19418 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
19419 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
19420 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
19421 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
19422
19423 <blockquote><pre>
19424 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
19425 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
19426 </pre></blockquote>
19427
19428 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
19429 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
19430 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
19431 search result is this entry:</p>
19432
19433 <blockquote><pre>
19434 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19435 cn: dhcp
19436 objectClass: top
19437 objectClass: dhcpServer
19438 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19439 </pre></blockquote>
19440
19441 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
19442 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
19443 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
19444 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
19445 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
19446 The search result is this entry:</p>
19447
19448 <blockquote><pre>
19449 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19450 cn: DHCP Config
19451 objectClass: top
19452 objectClass: dhcpService
19453 objectClass: dhcpOptions
19454 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19455 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
19456 dhcpStatements: authoritative
19457 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
19458 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
19459 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
19460 </pre></blockquote>
19461
19462 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
19463 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
19464 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
19465 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
19466 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
19467 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
19468 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
19469 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
19470 related computer objects.</p>
19471
19472 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
19473 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
19474 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
19475 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
19476 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
19477 like:</p>
19478
19479 <blockquote><pre>
19480 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19481 cn: hostname
19482 objectClass: top
19483 objectClass: dhcpHost
19484 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
19485 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
19486 </pre></blockquote>
19487
19488 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
19489 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
19490 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
19491 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
19492 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
19493 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
19494 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
19495 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
19496 structural object class.
19497
19498 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
19499
19500 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
19501 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
19502 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
19503 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
19504 in the configuration.</p>
19505
19506 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
19507 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
19508 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
19509 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
19510 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
19511 structure.</p>
19512
19513 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
19514 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
19515
19516 <blockquote><pre>
19517 ou=services
19518   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
19519     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
19520     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
19521       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
19522         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
19523     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
19524       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
19525         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
19526     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
19527       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
19528 </pre></blockquote>
19529
19530 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
19531 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
19532 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
19533 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
19534
19535 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
19536 like this:</p>
19537
19538 <blockquote><pre>
19539 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19540 dc: hostname
19541 objectClass: top
19542 objectClass: dhcpHost
19543 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19544 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
19545 associateddomain: hostname.intern
19546 arecord: 10.11.12.13
19547 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
19548 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
19549 </pre></blockquote>
19550
19551 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
19552 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
19553 auxiliary object class.</p>
19554
19555       </div>
19556       <div class="tags">
19557
19558
19559         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>.
19560
19561
19562       </div>
19563     </div>
19564     <div class="padding"></div>
19565
19566     <div class="entry">
19567       <div class="title">
19568         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
19569       </div>
19570       <div class="date">
19571         14th July 2010
19572       </div>
19573       <div class="body">
19574         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
19575 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
19576 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
19577 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
19578 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
19579
19580 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
19581 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
19582
19583 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
19584 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
19585 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
19586 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
19587 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
19588 to a slave DNS server.</p>
19589
19590 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
19591 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
19592 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
19593 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
19594 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
19595 seem to work.</p>
19596
19597 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
19598 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
19599 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
19600 this:</p>
19601
19602 <blockquote><pre>
19603   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19604   cn: hostname
19605   objectClass: dhcphost
19606   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19607   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
19608   associateddomain: hostname.intern
19609   arecord: 10.11.12.13
19610   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
19611   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
19612   ldapconfigsound: Y
19613 </pre></blockquote>
19614
19615 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
19616 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
19617 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
19618 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
19619
19620 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
19621 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
19622 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
19623 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
19624 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
19625 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
19626 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
19627 might be a good place to put it.</p>
19628
19629 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19630 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19631
19632       </div>
19633       <div class="tags">
19634
19635
19636         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>.
19637
19638
19639       </div>
19640     </div>
19641     <div class="padding"></div>
19642
19643     <div class="entry">
19644       <div class="title">
19645         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
19646       </div>
19647       <div class="date">
19648         11th July 2010
19649       </div>
19650       <div class="body">
19651         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
19652 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
19653 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
19654 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
19655
19656 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
19657 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
19658 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
19659 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
19660 LTSP clients.</p>
19661
19662 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
19663 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
19664 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
19665
19666 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
19667 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
19668 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
19669
19670 <blockquote><pre>
19671 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
19672 #
19673 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
19674 #
19675 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
19676 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
19677 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
19678 #
19679 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
19680 # existence of attribute names.
19681 #
19682 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
19683 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
19684 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
19685 #
19686 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
19687 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
19688 #
19689 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
19690 #     SUP top
19691 #     AUXILIARY
19692 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
19693
19694 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
19695 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
19696     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
19697     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
19698         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
19699         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
19700             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
19701             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
19702             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
19703             # bass value on to clients
19704             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
19705         done
19706     done
19707 fi
19708 </pre></blockquote>
19709
19710 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
19711 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
19712 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
19713 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
19714 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
19715
19716 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19717 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19718
19719 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
19720 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
19721 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
19722 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
19723 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
19724 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
19725
19726       </div>
19727       <div class="tags">
19728
19729
19730         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>.
19731
19732
19733       </div>
19734     </div>
19735     <div class="padding"></div>
19736
19737     <div class="entry">
19738       <div class="title">
19739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
19740       </div>
19741       <div class="date">
19742          9th July 2010
19743       </div>
19744       <div class="body">
19745         <p>Since
19746 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
19747 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
19748 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
19749 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
19750 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
19751 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
19752 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
19753 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
19754 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
19755 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
19756 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
19757 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
19758 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
19759
19760       </div>
19761       <div class="tags">
19762
19763
19764         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>.
19765
19766
19767       </div>
19768     </div>
19769     <div class="padding"></div>
19770
19771     <div class="entry">
19772       <div class="title">
19773         <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>
19774       </div>
19775       <div class="date">
19776          3rd July 2010
19777       </div>
19778       <div class="body">
19779         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
19780 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
19781 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
19782 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
19783 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
19784 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
19785 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
19786 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
19787
19788 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
19789 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
19790 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
19791 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
19792 publish the difference.</p>
19793
19794 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
19795
19796 <blockquote><p>
19797   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
19798   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
19799   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
19800   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
19801   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
19802   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
19803   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
19804   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
19805 </p></blockquote>
19806
19807 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
19808
19809 <blockquote><p>
19810   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
19811   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
19812   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
19813   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
19814   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
19815   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
19816   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
19817   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
19818   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
19819   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
19820   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
19821   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
19822   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
19823   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
19824   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
19825   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
19826   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
19827   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
19828   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
19829   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
19830 </p></blockquote>
19831
19832 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
19833
19834 <blockquote><p>
19835   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
19836   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
19837   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19838   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19839   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
19840   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
19841   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
19842   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19843   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19844   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19845   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19846   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
19847   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
19848   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
19849   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
19850   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
19851   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
19852   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
19853   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
19854   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
19855   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
19856 </p></blockquote>
19857
19858 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
19859
19860 <blockquote><p>
19861   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
19862   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
19863   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
19864 </p></blockquote>
19865
19866 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
19867 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
19868 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
19869 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
19870 the difference somewhat.
19871
19872       </div>
19873       <div class="tags">
19874
19875
19876         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>.
19877
19878
19879       </div>
19880     </div>
19881     <div class="padding"></div>
19882
19883     <div class="entry">
19884       <div class="title">
19885         <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>
19886       </div>
19887       <div class="date">
19888          1st July 2010
19889       </div>
19890       <div class="body">
19891         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
19892 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
19893 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
19894 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
19895 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
19896 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
19897 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
19898 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
19899 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
19900
19901 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
19902
19903 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
19904 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
19905 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
19906 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
19907 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
19908 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
19909 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
19910 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
19911 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
19912 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
19913 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
19914 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
19915 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
19916 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
19917 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
19918
19919 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
19920
19921 <blockquote><pre>
19922 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
19923 </pre></blockquote>
19924
19925 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
19926 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
19927 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
19928 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
19929 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
19930 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
19931 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
19932 on how to get this working.</p>
19933
19934 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
19935 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
19936 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
19937 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
19938 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
19939 instructions I found in the
19940 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
19941 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
19942
19943 <blockquote><pre>
19944         debug-level             0
19945         reload-count            unlimited
19946         paranoia                no
19947
19948         enable-cache            passwd          yes
19949         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
19950         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
19951         suggested-size          passwd          211
19952         check-files             passwd          yes
19953         persistent              passwd          yes
19954         shared                  passwd          yes
19955         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
19956         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
19957
19958         enable-cache            group           yes
19959         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
19960         negative-time-to-live   group           20
19961         suggested-size          group           211
19962         check-files             group           yes
19963         persistent              group           yes
19964         shared                  group           yes
19965         max-db-size             group           33554432
19966         auto-propagate          group           yes
19967
19968         enable-cache            hosts           no
19969         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
19970         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
19971         suggested-size          hosts           211
19972         check-files             hosts           yes
19973         persistent              hosts           yes
19974         shared                  hosts           yes
19975         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
19976
19977         enable-cache            services        yes
19978         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
19979         negative-time-to-live   services        20
19980         suggested-size          services        211
19981         check-files             services        yes
19982         persistent              services        yes
19983         shared                  services        yes
19984         max-db-size             services        33554432
19985 </pre></blockquote>
19986
19987 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
19988 automatically like the one provided in
19989 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
19990 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
19991 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
19992 look like this:</p>
19993
19994 <blockquote><pre>
19995 passwd:         files ldap
19996 group:          files ldap
19997 shadow:         files ldap
19998 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
19999 networks:       files
20000 protocols:      files
20001 services:       files
20002 ethers:         files
20003 rpc:            files
20004 netgroup:       files ldap
20005 </pre></blockquote>
20006
20007 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
20008 shadow and netgroup.</p>
20009
20010 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
20011 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
20012 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
20013 attributes cached.
20014
20015 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
20016   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
20017
20018 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
20019 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
20020 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
20021 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
20022 discovered sssd.</p>
20023
20024 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
20025
20026 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
20027 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
20028 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
20029 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
20030 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
20031 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
20032 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
20033 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
20034 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
20035 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
20036 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
20037 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
20038 version 1.2 is now in testing.
20039
20040 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
20041 roaming setup I want</p>
20042
20043 <blockquote><pre>
20044 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
20045 </pre></blockquote>
20046
20047 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
20048 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
20049
20050 <blockquote><pre>
20051 [sssd]
20052 config_file_version = 2
20053 reconnection_retries = 3
20054 sbus_timeout = 30
20055 services = nss, pam
20056 domains = INTERN
20057
20058 [nss]
20059 filter_groups = root
20060 filter_users = root
20061 reconnection_retries = 3
20062
20063 [pam]
20064 reconnection_retries = 3
20065
20066 [domain/INTERN]
20067 enumerate = false
20068 cache_credentials = true
20069
20070 id_provider = ldap
20071 auth_provider = ldap
20072 chpass_provider = ldap
20073
20074 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
20075 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20076 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
20077 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
20078 </pre></blockquote>
20079
20080 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
20081 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
20082
20083 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
20084 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
20085 modify it manually.</p>
20086
20087 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20088 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20089
20090       </div>
20091       <div class="tags">
20092
20093
20094         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>.
20095
20096
20097       </div>
20098     </div>
20099     <div class="padding"></div>
20100
20101     <div class="entry">
20102       <div class="title">
20103         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
20104       </div>
20105       <div class="date">
20106         28th June 2010
20107       </div>
20108       <div class="body">
20109         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
20110 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
20111 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
20112 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
20113 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
20114 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
20115 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
20116 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
20117 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
20118 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
20119
20120 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
20121 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
20122 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
20123 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
20124 released.</p>
20125
20126 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
20127 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
20128 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
20129 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
20130
20131 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
20132 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20133
20134 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
20135 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
20136 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
20137 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
20138 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
20139
20140       </div>
20141       <div class="tags">
20142
20143
20144         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>.
20145
20146
20147       </div>
20148     </div>
20149     <div class="padding"></div>
20150
20151     <div class="entry">
20152       <div class="title">
20153         <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>
20154       </div>
20155       <div class="date">
20156         24th June 2010
20157       </div>
20158       <div class="body">
20159         <p>A while back, I
20160 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
20161 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
20162 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
20163 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
20164
20165 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
20166 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
20167 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
20168 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
20169
20170 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
20171 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
20172 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
20173 Debian Edu.</p>
20174
20175 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
20176 the
20177 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
20178 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
20179 available today from IETF.</p>
20180
20181 <pre>
20182 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
20183 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
20184 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
20185  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
20186         NAME 'dhcpHost'
20187         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
20188 -       SUP top
20189 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
20190         MUST cn
20191         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
20192         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
20193 </pre>
20194
20195 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
20196 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
20197 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
20198
20199 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20200 please contact us on debian-edu@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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</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/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
20216       </div>
20217       <div class="date">
20218         16th June 2010
20219       </div>
20220       <div class="body">
20221         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
20222 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
20223 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
20224 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
20225 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
20226 this:
20227
20228 <blockquote><pre>
20229 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
20230 tasksel --new-install
20231 </pre></blockquote>
20232
20233 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
20234 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
20235 any output what so ever.
20236
20237 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
20238 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
20239 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
20240 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
20241 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
20242 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
20243 code like this:
20244
20245 <blockquote><pre>
20246 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
20247 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
20248 $cmd
20249 </pre></blockquote>
20250
20251 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
20252 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
20253 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
20254 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
20255 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
20256 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
20257 installation.</p>
20258
20259 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
20260 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
20261 like this.</p>
20262
20263       </div>
20264       <div class="tags">
20265
20266
20267         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>.
20268
20269
20270       </div>
20271     </div>
20272     <div class="padding"></div>
20273
20274     <div class="entry">
20275       <div class="title">
20276         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
20277       </div>
20278       <div class="date">
20279         13th June 2010
20280       </div>
20281       <div class="body">
20282         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
20283 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
20284 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
20285 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
20286 pages.</p>
20287
20288 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
20289 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
20290 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
20291 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
20292 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
20293 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
20294 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
20295 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
20296 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
20297 see how the project is doing.</p>
20298
20299 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
20300 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
20301 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
20302 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
20303 Windows.  This is great.</p>
20304
20305       </div>
20306       <div class="tags">
20307
20308
20309         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>.
20310
20311
20312       </div>
20313     </div>
20314     <div class="padding"></div>
20315
20316     <div class="entry">
20317       <div class="title">
20318         <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>
20319       </div>
20320       <div class="date">
20321         13th June 2010
20322       </div>
20323       <div class="body">
20324         <p>My
20325 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
20326 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
20327 finally made the upgrade logs available from
20328 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
20329 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
20330 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
20331 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
20332
20333 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
20334 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
20335 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
20336 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
20337 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
20338 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
20339 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
20340 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
20341
20342 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
20343 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
20344 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
20345 too surprising.</p>
20346
20347 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
20348 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
20349 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
20350 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
20351 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
20352 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
20353 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
20354 continue.</p>
20355
20356 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
20357 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
20358   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
20359   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
20360   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
20361   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
20362   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
20363   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
20364   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
20365   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
20366   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
20367   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
20368   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
20369   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
20370   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
20371   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20372   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
20373   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
20374   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
20375   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
20376   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
20377   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
20378   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
20379   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
20380   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
20381   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
20382   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
20383   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
20384   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
20385   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
20386
20387 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
20388
20389 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
20390   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
20391   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
20392   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
20393   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
20394   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
20395   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
20396   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
20397   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
20398   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
20399   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
20400   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
20401   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
20402   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
20403   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
20404   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
20405   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
20406   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
20407   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
20408   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
20409   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
20410   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
20411   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
20412   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
20413   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
20414   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
20415   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
20416   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
20417   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
20418   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20419   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
20420   zip</p>
20421
20422 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
20423
20424 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
20425   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
20426   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
20427   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
20428   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
20429   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
20430   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
20431   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
20432   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
20433   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
20434   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
20435   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
20436   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
20437   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
20438   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20439   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
20440   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
20441   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
20442   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
20443   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
20444   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
20445   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
20446   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
20447   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
20448   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
20449   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
20450   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
20451   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
20452
20453 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
20454 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
20455   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
20456   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
20457   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
20458   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
20459   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
20460   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
20461   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
20462   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
20463   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
20464   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
20465   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
20466   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
20467   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
20468   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
20469   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
20470   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
20471   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
20472   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
20473   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
20474   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
20475   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
20476   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
20477   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
20478   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
20479   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
20480   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
20481   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
20482   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
20483   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
20484   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
20485   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
20486   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
20487   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
20488   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20489   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
20490   xulrunner-1.9</p>
20491
20492
20493       </div>
20494       <div class="tags">
20495
20496
20497         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>.
20498
20499
20500       </div>
20501     </div>
20502     <div class="padding"></div>
20503
20504     <div class="entry">
20505       <div class="title">
20506         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
20507       </div>
20508       <div class="date">
20509         11th June 2010
20510       </div>
20511       <div class="body">
20512         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
20513 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
20514 have been discovered and reported in the process
20515 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
20516 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
20517 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
20518 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
20519 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
20520
20521 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
20522 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
20523 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
20524 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
20525 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
20526 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
20527
20528 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
20529 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
20530 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
20531 is created.  The bug report
20532 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
20533 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
20534 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
20535 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
20536 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
20537 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
20538 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
20539 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
20540 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
20541 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
20542 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
20543 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
20544 Debian Squeeze.</p>
20545
20546 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
20547 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
20548 trick:</p>
20549
20550 <blockquote><pre>
20551 #!/bin/sh
20552 set -ex
20553
20554 if [ "$1" ] ; then
20555     desktop=$1
20556 else
20557     desktop=gnome
20558 fi
20559
20560 from=lenny
20561 to=squeeze
20562
20563 exec &lt; /dev/null
20564 unset LANG
20565 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
20566 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
20567 fuser -mv .
20568 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
20569 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
20570 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
20571 #!/bin/sh
20572 exit 101
20573 EOF
20574 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
20575 exit_cleanup() {
20576     umount $tmpdir/proc
20577 }
20578 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
20579 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
20580 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
20581
20582 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
20583
20584 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
20585 # to return the correct answers.
20586 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
20587     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
20588
20589 # Include the desktop and laptop task
20590 for test in desktop laptop ; do
20591     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
20592 #!/bin/sh
20593 exit 2
20594 EOF
20595     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
20596 done
20597
20598 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
20599 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
20600 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
20601 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
20602
20603 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
20604 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
20605 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
20606 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
20607 fuser -mv
20608 </pre></blockquote>
20609
20610 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
20611 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
20612 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
20613 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
20614 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
20615 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
20616
20617 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
20618 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
20619 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
20620 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
20621 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
20622 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
20623 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
20624
20625 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
20626 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
20627 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
20628 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
20629 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
20630 packages.</p>
20631
20632       </div>
20633       <div class="tags">
20634
20635
20636         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>.
20637
20638
20639       </div>
20640     </div>
20641     <div class="padding"></div>
20642
20643     <div class="entry">
20644       <div class="title">
20645         <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>
20646       </div>
20647       <div class="date">
20648          6th June 2010
20649       </div>
20650       <div class="body">
20651         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
20652 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
20653 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
20654 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
20655 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
20656 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
20657 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
20658
20659 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
20660 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
20661 COLUMNS):</p>
20662
20663 <blockquote><pre>
20664 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
20665 previous=N
20666 PREVLEVEL=
20667 RUNLEVEL=
20668 runlevel=S
20669 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
20670 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
20671 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
20672 </pre></blockquote>
20673
20674 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
20675 script.</p>
20676
20677 <blockquote><pre>
20678 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
20679 previous=N
20680 PREVLEVEL=N
20681 RUNLEVEL=S
20682 runlevel=S
20683 </pre></blockquote>
20684
20685 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
20686 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
20687 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
20688
20689 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
20690 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
20691 choice.</p>
20692
20693       </div>
20694       <div class="tags">
20695
20696
20697         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>.
20698
20699
20700       </div>
20701     </div>
20702     <div class="padding"></div>
20703
20704     <div class="entry">
20705       <div class="title">
20706         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
20707       </div>
20708       <div class="date">
20709          6th June 2010
20710       </div>
20711       <div class="body">
20712         <p>Via the
20713 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
20714 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
20715 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
20716 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
20717 following the standards wars of today.</p>
20718
20719       </div>
20720       <div class="tags">
20721
20722
20723         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>.
20724
20725
20726       </div>
20727     </div>
20728     <div class="padding"></div>
20729
20730     <div class="entry">
20731       <div class="title">
20732         <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>
20733       </div>
20734       <div class="date">
20735          3rd June 2010
20736       </div>
20737       <div class="body">
20738         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
20739 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
20740 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
20741 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
20742 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
20743
20744 <blockquote><pre>
20745 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
20746   vendor                    count
20747   Dell Computer Corporation     1
20748     PowerEdge 1750              1
20749   IBM                           1
20750     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
20751   Intel                         2
20752   [no-dmi-info]                 3
20753 maintainer:~#
20754 </pre></blockquote>
20755
20756 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
20757 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
20758 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
20759 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
20760 option to list the individual machines.</p>
20761
20762 <p>A larger list is
20763 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
20764 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
20765 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
20766 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
20767 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
20768 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
20769 collector.</p>
20770
20771       </div>
20772       <div class="tags">
20773
20774
20775         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>.
20776
20777
20778       </div>
20779     </div>
20780     <div class="padding"></div>
20781
20782     <div class="entry">
20783       <div class="title">
20784         <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>
20785       </div>
20786       <div class="date">
20787          1st June 2010
20788       </div>
20789       <div class="body">
20790         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
20791 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
20792 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
20793 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
20794 wait.</p>
20795
20796 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
20797 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
20798 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
20799 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
20800 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
20801 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
20802
20803 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
20804 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
20805 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
20806 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
20807 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
20808 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
20809 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
20810 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
20811
20812 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
20813
20814       </div>
20815       <div class="tags">
20816
20817
20818         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>.
20819
20820
20821       </div>
20822     </div>
20823     <div class="padding"></div>
20824
20825     <div class="entry">
20826       <div class="title">
20827         <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>
20828       </div>
20829       <div class="date">
20830         27th May 2010
20831       </div>
20832       <div class="body">
20833         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
20834 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
20835 issues are known and should be solved:
20836
20837 <p><ul>
20838
20839 <li>The wicd package seen to
20840 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
20841 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
20842 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
20843 seem to be on the case.</li>
20844
20845 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
20846 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
20847 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
20848 maintainer is on the case.</li>
20849
20850 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
20851 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
20852 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
20853 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
20854 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
20855 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
20856 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
20857 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
20858
20859 </ul></p>
20860
20861 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
20862 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
20863 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
20864 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
20865
20866 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20867 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20868 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20869 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20870
20871 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
20872
20873       </div>
20874       <div class="tags">
20875
20876
20877         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>.
20878
20879
20880       </div>
20881     </div>
20882     <div class="padding"></div>
20883
20884     <div class="entry">
20885       <div class="title">
20886         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
20887       </div>
20888       <div class="date">
20889         22nd May 2010
20890       </div>
20891       <div class="body">
20892         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
20893 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
20894 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
20895 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
20896
20897 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
20898 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
20899 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
20900 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
20901 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
20902 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
20903 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
20904 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
20905 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
20906 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
20907 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
20908 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
20909 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
20910 going to work.</p>
20911
20912 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
20913 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
20914 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
20915 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
20916 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
20917 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
20918 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
20919 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
20920 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
20921 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
20922 Edu.</p>
20923
20924 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
20925 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
20926 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
20927 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
20928 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
20929 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
20930
20931 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
20932 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
20933
20934       </div>
20935       <div class="tags">
20936
20937
20938         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>.
20939
20940
20941       </div>
20942     </div>
20943     <div class="padding"></div>
20944
20945     <div class="entry">
20946       <div class="title">
20947         <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>
20948       </div>
20949       <div class="date">
20950         19th May 2010
20951       </div>
20952       <div class="body">
20953         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
20954 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
20955 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
20956 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
20957 into unstable.  The
20958 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
20959 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
20960 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
20961 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
20962 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
20963 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
20964 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
20965
20966 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
20967 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
20968 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
20969 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
20970 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
20971 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
20972 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
20973 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
20974
20975 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
20976 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
20977 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
20978 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
20979 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
20980 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
20981 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
20982
20983 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
20984 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
20985 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
20986 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
20987 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
20988 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
20989 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
20990 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
20991 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
20992 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
20993 on the home directory servers.</p>
20994
20995 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
20996 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
20997 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
20998 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
20999 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
21000 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
21001
21002 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21003 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21004
21005       </div>
21006       <div class="tags">
21007
21008
21009         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>.
21010
21011
21012       </div>
21013     </div>
21014     <div class="padding"></div>
21015
21016     <div class="entry">
21017       <div class="title">
21018         <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>
21019       </div>
21020       <div class="date">
21021         14th May 2010
21022       </div>
21023       <div class="body">
21024         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
21025 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
21026 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
21027 expected, if I am to believe the
21028 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
21029 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
21030 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
21031 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
21032 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
21033 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
21034 version.</p>
21035
21036 More information about
21037 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
21038 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
21039 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
21040 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
21041
21042 <blockquote><pre>
21043 CONCURRENCY=none
21044 </pre></blockquote>
21045
21046 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
21047 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
21048 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
21049 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
21050
21051       </div>
21052       <div class="tags">
21053
21054
21055         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>.
21056
21057
21058       </div>
21059     </div>
21060     <div class="padding"></div>
21061
21062     <div class="entry">
21063       <div class="title">
21064         <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>
21065       </div>
21066       <div class="date">
21067         14th May 2010
21068       </div>
21069       <div class="body">
21070         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
21071 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
21072 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
21073 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
21074 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
21075 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
21076 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
21077 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
21078
21079 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
21080 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
21081 this on the collector host:</p>
21082
21083 <blockquote><pre>
21084 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
21085 </pre></blockquote>
21086
21087 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
21088 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
21089
21090 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
21091 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
21092 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
21093 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
21094 written yet.</p>
21095
21096       </div>
21097       <div class="tags">
21098
21099
21100         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>.
21101
21102
21103       </div>
21104     </div>
21105     <div class="padding"></div>
21106
21107     <div class="entry">
21108       <div class="title">
21109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
21110       </div>
21111       <div class="date">
21112         13th May 2010
21113       </div>
21114       <div class="body">
21115         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
21116 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
21117 has been
21118 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
21119
21120 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
21121 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
21122 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
21123 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
21124 based boot system.  Tollef is
21125 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
21126 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
21127 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
21128 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
21129 at the moment do not.</p>
21130
21131 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
21132 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
21133 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
21134 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
21135 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
21136 way forward.</p>
21137
21138 <p>In the mean time, based on the
21139 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
21140 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
21141 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
21142 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
21143 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
21144 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
21145 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
21146 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
21147
21148       </div>
21149       <div class="tags">
21150
21151
21152         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>.
21153
21154
21155       </div>
21156     </div>
21157     <div class="padding"></div>
21158
21159     <div class="entry">
21160       <div class="title">
21161         <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>
21162       </div>
21163       <div class="date">
21164          6th May 2010
21165       </div>
21166       <div class="body">
21167         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
21168 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
21169 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
21170 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
21171 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
21172 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
21173 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
21174
21175 <blockquote><pre>
21176 CONCURRENCY=makefile
21177 </pre></blockquote>
21178
21179 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
21180 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
21181 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
21182 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
21183 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
21184 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
21185 make this happen.</p>
21186
21187 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
21188 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
21189 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
21190 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
21191 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
21192
21193 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
21194 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
21195 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
21196 fix the remaining issues.</p>
21197
21198 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
21199 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
21200 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
21201 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
21202
21203       </div>
21204       <div class="tags">
21205
21206
21207         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>.
21208
21209
21210       </div>
21211     </div>
21212     <div class="padding"></div>
21213
21214     <div class="entry">
21215       <div class="title">
21216         <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>
21217       </div>
21218       <div class="date">
21219          2nd May 2010
21220       </div>
21221       <div class="body">
21222         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
21223 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
21224 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
21225
21226 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
21227 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
21228 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
21229 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
21230 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
21231
21232 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
21233 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
21234
21235 <blockquote><pre>
21236 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
21237 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
21238 Password expires                                        : never
21239 Password inactive                                       : never
21240 Account expires                                         : never
21241 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
21242 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
21243 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
21244 root@tjener:~#
21245 </pre></blockquote>
21246
21247 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
21248 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
21249 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
21250 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
21251 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
21252 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
21253
21254 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
21255 intended:</p>
21256
21257 <blockquote><pre>
21258 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
21259 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
21260 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
21261 Password expires                                        : never
21262 Password inactive                                       : never
21263 Account expires                                         : never
21264 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
21265 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
21266 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
21267 root@tjener:~#
21268 </pre></blockquote>
21269
21270 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
21271 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
21272 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
21273
21274 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
21275 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
21276
21277 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
21278 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21279
21280 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
21281 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
21282 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
21283 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
21284 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
21285 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
21286 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
21287
21288 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
21289 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
21290 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
21291 change.</p>
21292
21293       </div>
21294       <div class="tags">
21295
21296
21297         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>.
21298
21299
21300       </div>
21301     </div>
21302     <div class="padding"></div>
21303
21304     <div class="entry">
21305       <div class="title">
21306         <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>
21307       </div>
21308       <div class="date">
21309         28th April 2010
21310       </div>
21311       <div class="body">
21312         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
21313 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
21314 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
21315 and go.</p>
21316
21317 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
21318 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
21319 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
21320 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
21321
21322 <ul>
21323
21324  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
21325    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
21326    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
21327    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
21328    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
21329    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
21330    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
21331    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
21332    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
21333    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
21334    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
21335    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
21336
21337  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
21338    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
21339    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
21340    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
21341    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
21342    or the Fedora developed
21343    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
21344    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
21345
21346  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
21347    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
21348    directory, using unison.</li>
21349
21350  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
21351    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
21352    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
21353    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
21354    implemented.</li>
21355
21356  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
21357    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
21358
21359  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
21360    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
21361    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
21362
21363 </ul>
21364
21365 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
21366 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
21367 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
21368 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
21369 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
21370 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
21371 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
21372 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
21373 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
21374
21375 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21376 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21377
21378       </div>
21379       <div class="tags">
21380
21381
21382         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>.
21383
21384
21385       </div>
21386     </div>
21387     <div class="padding"></div>
21388
21389     <div class="entry">
21390       <div class="title">
21391         <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>
21392       </div>
21393       <div class="date">
21394         19th April 2010
21395       </div>
21396       <div class="body">
21397         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
21398 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
21399 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
21400 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
21401 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
21402 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
21403 restrictions on the web, for example from
21404 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
21405 epub-version from
21406 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
21407 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
21408 strongly recommend this book.</p>
21409
21410       </div>
21411       <div class="tags">
21412
21413
21414         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>.
21415
21416
21417       </div>
21418     </div>
21419     <div class="padding"></div>
21420
21421     <div class="entry">
21422       <div class="title">
21423         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
21424       </div>
21425       <div class="date">
21426         14th April 2010
21427       </div>
21428       <div class="body">
21429         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
21430 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
21431 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
21432 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
21433 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
21434 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
21435 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
21436 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
21437 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
21438
21439 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
21440 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
21441 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
21442 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
21443 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
21444
21445 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
21446 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
21447
21448 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
21449 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
21450 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
21451 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
21452 to work properly.</p>
21453
21454 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
21455 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
21456 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
21457 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
21458 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
21459 time.</p>
21460
21461 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
21462 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
21463 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
21464 up in a few days.</p>
21465
21466       </div>
21467       <div class="tags">
21468
21469
21470         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>.
21471
21472
21473       </div>
21474     </div>
21475     <div class="padding"></div>
21476
21477     <div class="entry">
21478       <div class="title">
21479         <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>
21480       </div>
21481       <div class="date">
21482          6th March 2010
21483       </div>
21484       <div class="body">
21485         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
21486 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
21487 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
21488 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
21489 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
21490 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
21491
21492 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
21493 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
21494 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
21495 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
21496
21497 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
21498 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
21499 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
21500 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
21501 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
21502 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
21503
21504       </div>
21505       <div class="tags">
21506
21507
21508         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>.
21509
21510
21511       </div>
21512     </div>
21513     <div class="padding"></div>
21514
21515     <div class="entry">
21516       <div class="title">
21517         <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>
21518       </div>
21519       <div class="date">
21520         11th February 2010
21521       </div>
21522       <div class="body">
21523         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
21524 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
21525 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
21526 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
21527 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
21528 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
21529 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
21530
21531 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
21532
21533 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
21534 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
21535 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
21536 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
21537
21538       </div>
21539       <div class="tags">
21540
21541
21542         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>.
21543
21544
21545       </div>
21546     </div>
21547     <div class="padding"></div>
21548
21549     <div class="entry">
21550       <div class="title">
21551         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
21552       </div>
21553       <div class="date">
21554         27th January 2010
21555       </div>
21556       <div class="body">
21557         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
21558 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
21559 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
21560 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
21561 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
21562 further.</p>
21563
21564 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
21565 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
21566 configured to be a server for the
21567 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
21568 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
21569 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
21570 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
21571 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
21572 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
21573 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
21574 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
21575 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
21576 and Nagios configuration.</p>
21577
21578 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
21579 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
21580 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
21581 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
21582
21583 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
21584 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
21585 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
21586 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
21587 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
21588 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
21589 the machine.</p>
21590
21591 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
21592 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
21593 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
21594 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
21595
21596 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
21597 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
21598 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
21599 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
21600 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
21601 everything is taken care of.</p>
21602
21603       </div>
21604       <div class="tags">
21605
21606
21607         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>.
21608
21609
21610       </div>
21611     </div>
21612     <div class="padding"></div>
21613
21614     <div class="entry">
21615       <div class="title">
21616         <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>
21617       </div>
21618       <div class="date">
21619         12th August 2009
21620       </div>
21621       <div class="body">
21622         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
21623 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
21624 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
21625 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
21626
21627 <table>
21628 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21629 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
21630 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
21631 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
21632 </table>
21633
21634 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
21635 got these numbers:</p>
21636
21637 <table>
21638 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21639 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
21640 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
21641 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
21642 </table>
21643
21644 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
21645
21646 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
21647 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
21648 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
21649 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
21650 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
21651
21652
21653 <table>
21654 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21655 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
21656 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
21657 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
21658 </table>
21659
21660 <p>And with 'site:no':
21661
21662 <table>
21663 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21664 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
21665 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
21666 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
21667 </table>
21668
21669 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
21670 numbers.</p>
21671
21672       </div>
21673       <div class="tags">
21674
21675
21676         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>.
21677
21678
21679       </div>
21680     </div>
21681     <div class="padding"></div>
21682
21683     <div class="entry">
21684       <div class="title">
21685         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
21686       </div>
21687       <div class="date">
21688          8th August 2009
21689       </div>
21690       <div class="body">
21691         <p>According to <a
21692 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
21693 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
21694 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
21695 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
21696 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
21697 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
21698 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
21699 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
21700 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
21701 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
21702
21703 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
21704 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
21705 seminar this autumn.</p>
21706
21707       </div>
21708       <div class="tags">
21709
21710
21711         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>.
21712
21713
21714       </div>
21715     </div>
21716     <div class="padding"></div>
21717
21718     <div class="entry">
21719       <div class="title">
21720         <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>
21721       </div>
21722       <div class="date">
21723         27th July 2009
21724       </div>
21725       <div class="body">
21726         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
21727 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
21728 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
21729 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
21730 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
21731 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
21732 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
21733
21734 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
21735 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
21736 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
21737
21738       </div>
21739       <div class="tags">
21740
21741
21742         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>.
21743
21744
21745       </div>
21746     </div>
21747     <div class="padding"></div>
21748
21749     <div class="entry">
21750       <div class="title">
21751         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
21752       </div>
21753       <div class="date">
21754         22nd July 2009
21755       </div>
21756       <div class="body">
21757         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
21758 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
21759 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
21760 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
21761 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
21762 the package up to date.</p>
21763
21764 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
21765 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
21766 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
21767 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
21768 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
21769 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
21770 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
21771 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
21772 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
21773 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
21774 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
21775 working on the future release.</p>
21776
21777 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
21778 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
21779
21780       </div>
21781       <div class="tags">
21782
21783
21784         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>.
21785
21786
21787       </div>
21788     </div>
21789     <div class="padding"></div>
21790
21791     <div class="entry">
21792       <div class="title">
21793         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
21794       </div>
21795       <div class="date">
21796         24th June 2009
21797       </div>
21798       <div class="body">
21799         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
21800 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
21801 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
21802 funded
21803 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
21804 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
21805 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
21806 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
21807 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
21808 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
21809
21810 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
21811 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
21812 boot:</p>
21813
21814 <ul>
21815
21816 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
21817
21818 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
21819    clock is in UTC.</li>
21820
21821 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
21822    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
21823    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
21824
21825 </ul>
21826
21827 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
21828 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
21829 Villegas</a>.
21830
21831 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
21832 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
21833 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
21834 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
21835 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
21836 using this.</p>
21837
21838 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
21839 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
21840 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
21841 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
21842 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
21843 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
21844 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
21845
21846       </div>
21847       <div class="tags">
21848
21849
21850         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>.
21851
21852
21853       </div>
21854     </div>
21855     <div class="padding"></div>
21856
21857     <div class="entry">
21858       <div class="title">
21859         <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>
21860       </div>
21861       <div class="date">
21862          2nd May 2009
21863       </div>
21864       <div class="body">
21865         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
21866 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
21867 do not yet know them.</p>
21868
21869 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
21870 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
21871 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
21872 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
21873 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
21874 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
21875 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
21876 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
21877 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
21878 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
21879 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
21880
21881 <p>The second one is
21882 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
21883 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
21884 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
21885 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
21886 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
21887 and the company behind it is running
21888 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
21889 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
21890 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
21891 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
21892 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
21893 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
21894 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
21895 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
21896
21897 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
21898 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
21899 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
21900 surrounded by today.</p>
21901
21902       </div>
21903       <div class="tags">
21904
21905
21906         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>.
21907
21908
21909       </div>
21910     </div>
21911     <div class="padding"></div>
21912
21913     <div class="entry">
21914       <div class="title">
21915         <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>
21916       </div>
21917       <div class="date">
21918         28th April 2009
21919       </div>
21920       <div class="body">
21921         <p>Julien Blache
21922 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
21923 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
21924 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
21925 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
21926 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
21927 properties.</p>
21928
21929       </div>
21930       <div class="tags">
21931
21932
21933         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>.
21934
21935
21936       </div>
21937     </div>
21938     <div class="padding"></div>
21939
21940     <div class="entry">
21941       <div class="title">
21942         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
21943       </div>
21944       <div class="date">
21945          5th April 2009
21946       </div>
21947       <div class="body">
21948         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
21949 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
21950 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
21951 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
21952 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
21953 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
21954 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
21955 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
21956
21957 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
21958 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
21959 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
21960   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21961   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
21962
21963 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
21964 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
21965 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
21966 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
21967
21968 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
21969 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
21970 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
21971 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
21972
21973 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
21974 set -e
21975 URL="$1"
21976 SAVEFILE="$2"
21977 DURATION="$3"
21978 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
21979   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21980   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
21981 pid=$!
21982 sleep $DURATION
21983 kill $pid
21984 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
21985
21986       </div>
21987       <div class="tags">
21988
21989
21990         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>.
21991
21992
21993       </div>
21994     </div>
21995     <div class="padding"></div>
21996
21997     <div class="entry">
21998       <div class="title">
21999         <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>
22000       </div>
22001       <div class="date">
22002         30th March 2009
22003       </div>
22004       <div class="body">
22005         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
22006 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
22007 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
22008 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
22009 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
22010 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
22011 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
22012 application.</p>
22013
22014 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
22015 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
22016 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
22017 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
22018 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
22019 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
22020 blocked from doing so.</p>
22021
22022 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
22023 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
22024 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
22025 requirements change.</p>
22026
22027 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
22028 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
22029 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
22030
22031       </div>
22032       <div class="tags">
22033
22034
22035         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>.
22036
22037
22038       </div>
22039     </div>
22040     <div class="padding"></div>
22041
22042     <div class="entry">
22043       <div class="title">
22044         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
22045       </div>
22046       <div class="date">
22047         29th March 2009
22048       </div>
22049       <div class="body">
22050         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
22051 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
22052 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
22053 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
22054 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
22055 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
22056 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
22057 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
22058 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
22059 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
22060 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
22061 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
22062 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
22063 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
22064 now. :)</p>
22065
22066       </div>
22067       <div class="tags">
22068
22069
22070         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>.
22071
22072
22073       </div>
22074     </div>
22075     <div class="padding"></div>
22076
22077     <div class="entry">
22078       <div class="title">
22079         <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>
22080       </div>
22081       <div class="date">
22082         29th March 2009
22083       </div>
22084       <div class="body">
22085         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
22086 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
22087 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
22088 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
22089 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
22090 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
22091
22092 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
22093 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
22094 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
22095 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
22096 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
22097 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
22098 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
22099 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
22100 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
22101 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
22102 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
22103 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
22104 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
22105
22106 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
22107 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
22108 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
22109 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
22110
22111 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
22112 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
22113
22114 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
22115 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
22116 new IETF work group?</p>
22117
22118       </div>
22119       <div class="tags">
22120
22121
22122         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>.
22123
22124
22125       </div>
22126     </div>
22127     <div class="padding"></div>
22128
22129     <div class="entry">
22130       <div class="title">
22131         <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>
22132       </div>
22133       <div class="date">
22134         28th February 2009
22135       </div>
22136       <div class="body">
22137         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
22138 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
22139 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
22140 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
22141 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
22142 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
22143 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
22144 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
22145 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
22146 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
22147 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
22148 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
22149 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
22150 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
22151 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
22152 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
22153 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
22154 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
22155 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
22156 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
22157 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
22158 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
22159 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
22160 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
22161 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
22162 machine.</p>
22163
22164 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
22165 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
22166 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
22167 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
22168 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
22169 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
22170 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
22171
22172 <pre>
22173 use LWP::Simple;
22174 use POSIX;
22175 use WWW::Mechanize;
22176 use Date::Parse;
22177 [...]
22178 sub get_support_info {
22179     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
22180     my $str;
22181
22182     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
22183         # fetch website from Dell support
22184         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";
22185         my $webpage = get($url);
22186         return undef unless ($webpage);
22187
22188         my $daysleft = -1;
22189         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
22190         foreach my $line (@lines) {
22191             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
22192             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
22193             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
22194
22195             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
22196             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
22197             my $lastend = "";
22198             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
22199                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
22200
22201                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22202                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
22203                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22204                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
22205                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
22206                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
22207                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
22208             }
22209             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
22210             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
22211                 if ($lastend lt $today);
22212         }
22213     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
22214         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
22215         my $url =
22216             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
22217         $mech->get($url);
22218         my $fields = {
22219             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
22220             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
22221             'country' => 'NO',
22222             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
22223             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
22224         };
22225         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
22226                             fields      => $fields );
22227         # Next step is screen scraping
22228         my $content = $mech->content();
22229
22230         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
22231         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
22232         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
22233         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
22234
22235         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
22236
22237         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
22238             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
22239                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
22240             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
22241             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22242                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
22243             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22244                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
22245
22246             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
22247
22248             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
22249                 if ($end lt $today);
22250         }
22251     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
22252         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
22253         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
22254         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
22255             my $content =
22256                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
22257             if ($content) {
22258                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
22259                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
22260                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
22261                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
22262
22263                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
22264                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
22265
22266                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
22267
22268                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
22269                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
22270                     if ($end lt $today);
22271             }
22272         }
22273     }
22274     return $str;
22275 }
22276 </pre>
22277
22278 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
22279 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
22280 from dmidecode.</p>
22281
22282 <pre>
22283 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
22284                        "447707-B21");
22285 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
22286 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
22287                        "1234567");
22288 </pre>
22289
22290 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
22291 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
22292
22293 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
22294 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
22295 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
22296 do so.</p>
22297
22298       </div>
22299       <div class="tags">
22300
22301
22302         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>.
22303
22304
22305       </div>
22306     </div>
22307     <div class="padding"></div>
22308
22309     <div class="entry">
22310       <div class="title">
22311         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
22312       </div>
22313       <div class="date">
22314         20th February 2009
22315       </div>
22316       <div class="body">
22317         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
22318 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
22319 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
22320 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
22321 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
22322 the "missing" computer.</p>
22323
22324 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
22325 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
22326 code blocks as defined in the
22327 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
22328 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
22329 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
22330 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
22331 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
22332 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
22333 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
22334 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
22335 codes.</p>
22336
22337 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
22338 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
22339 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
22340 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
22341 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
22342 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
22343
22344 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
22345 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
22346 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
22347 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
22348 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
22349 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
22350 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
22351 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
22352 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
22353 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
22354
22355 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
22356 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
22357 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
22358
22359       </div>
22360       <div class="tags">
22361
22362
22363         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>.
22364
22365
22366       </div>
22367     </div>
22368     <div class="padding"></div>
22369
22370     <div class="entry">
22371       <div class="title">
22372         <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>
22373       </div>
22374       <div class="date">
22375         17th January 2009
22376       </div>
22377       <div class="body">
22378         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
22379 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
22380 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
22381 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
22382 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
22383 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
22384 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
22385 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
22386 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
22387 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
22388 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
22389 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
22390 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
22391 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
22392
22393 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
22394 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
22395 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
22396 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
22397 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
22398 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
22399 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
22400 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
22401 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
22402 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
22403 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
22404 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
22405 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
22406 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
22407 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
22408 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
22409 playing when the download is done.</p>
22410
22411 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
22412 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
22413 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
22414 too.</p>
22415
22416 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
22417 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
22418 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
22419 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
22420
22421       </div>
22422       <div class="tags">
22423
22424
22425         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>.
22426
22427
22428       </div>
22429     </div>
22430     <div class="padding"></div>
22431
22432     <div class="entry">
22433       <div class="title">
22434         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
22435       </div>
22436       <div class="date">
22437         28th December 2008
22438       </div>
22439       <div class="body">
22440         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
22441 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
22442 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
22443 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
22444 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
22445 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
22446 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
22447 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
22448 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
22449 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
22450 source, sink and mixer applications and
22451 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
22452 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
22453 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
22454 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
22455 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
22456 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
22457 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
22458 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
22459 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
22460
22461 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
22462 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
22463 larger stick as well.</p>
22464
22465       </div>
22466       <div class="tags">
22467
22468
22469         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>.
22470
22471
22472       </div>
22473     </div>
22474     <div class="padding"></div>
22475
22476     <div class="entry">
22477       <div class="title">
22478         <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>
22479       </div>
22480       <div class="date">
22481          7th December 2008
22482       </div>
22483       <div class="body">
22484         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
22485 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
22486 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
22487 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
22488 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
22489 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
22490 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
22491 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
22492
22493 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
22494 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
22495 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
22496 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
22497 of these cards.</p>
22498
22499       </div>
22500       <div class="tags">
22501
22502
22503         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>.
22504
22505
22506       </div>
22507     </div>
22508     <div class="padding"></div>
22509
22510     <div class="entry">
22511       <div class="title">
22512         <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>
22513       </div>
22514       <div class="date">
22515         25th November 2008
22516       </div>
22517       <div class="body">
22518         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
22519 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
22520 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
22521 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
22522 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
22523 notes are available on
22524 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
22525 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
22526 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
22527 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
22528 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
22529 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
22530 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
22531 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
22532 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
22533
22534 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
22535 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
22536
22537       </div>
22538       <div class="tags">
22539
22540
22541         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>.
22542
22543
22544       </div>
22545     </div>
22546     <div class="padding"></div>
22547
22548     <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>
22549     <div id="sidebar">
22550
22551
22552
22553 <h2>Archive</h2>
22554 <ul>
22555
22556 <li>2015
22557 <ul>
22558
22559 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
22560
22561 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
22562
22563 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
22564
22565 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
22566
22567 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (2)</a></li>
22568
22569 </ul></li>
22570
22571 <li>2014
22572 <ul>
22573
22574 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
22575
22576 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
22577
22578 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
22579
22580 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
22581
22582 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
22583
22584 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
22585
22586 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
22587
22588 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
22589
22590 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
22591
22592 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
22593
22594 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22595
22596 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
22597
22598 </ul></li>
22599
22600 <li>2013
22601 <ul>
22602
22603 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
22604
22605 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
22606
22607 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
22608
22609 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
22610
22611 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
22612
22613 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
22614
22615 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
22616
22617 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
22618
22619 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
22620
22621 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
22622
22623 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
22624
22625 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
22626
22627 </ul></li>
22628
22629 <li>2012
22630 <ul>
22631
22632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
22633
22634 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
22635
22636 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
22637
22638 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
22639
22640 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
22641
22642 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
22643
22644 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
22645
22646 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
22647
22648 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
22649
22650 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
22651
22652 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
22653
22654 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
22655
22656 </ul></li>
22657
22658 <li>2011
22659 <ul>
22660
22661 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
22662
22663 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
22664
22665 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
22666
22667 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
22668
22669 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
22670
22671 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
22672
22673 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
22674
22675 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
22676
22677 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
22678
22679 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
22680
22681 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22682
22683 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
22684
22685 </ul></li>
22686
22687 <li>2010
22688 <ul>
22689
22690 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
22691
22692 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
22693
22694 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
22695
22696 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
22697
22698 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
22699
22700 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
22701
22702 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
22703
22704 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
22705
22706 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
22707
22708 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
22709
22710 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
22711
22712 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
22713
22714 </ul></li>
22715
22716 <li>2009
22717 <ul>
22718
22719 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
22720
22721 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
22722
22723 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
22724
22725 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
22726
22727 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
22728
22729 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
22730
22731 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
22732
22733 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
22734
22735 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
22736
22737 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
22738
22739 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22740
22741 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
22742
22743 </ul></li>
22744
22745 <li>2008
22746 <ul>
22747
22748 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
22749
22750 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
22751
22752 </ul></li>
22753
22754 </ul>
22755
22756
22757
22758 <h2>Tags</h2>
22759 <ul>
22760
22761  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
22762
22763  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
22764
22765  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
22766
22767  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
22768
22769  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (8)</a></li>
22770
22771  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
22772
22773  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
22774
22775  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
22776
22777  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (109)</a></li>
22778
22779  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (153)</a></li>
22780
22781  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
22782
22783  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
22784
22785  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (13)</a></li>
22786
22787  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
22788
22789  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (277)</a></li>
22790
22791  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
22792
22793  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
22794
22795  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (15)</a></li>
22796
22797  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
22798
22799  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (14)</a></li>
22800
22801  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
22802
22803  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (10)</a></li>
22804
22805  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
22806
22807  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
22808
22809  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
22810
22811  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
22812
22813  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
22814
22815  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
22816
22817  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (32)</a></li>
22818
22819  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (260)</a></li>
22820
22821  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (176)</a></li>
22822
22823  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (16)</a></li>
22824
22825  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
22826
22827  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (51)</a></li>
22828
22829  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (85)</a></li>
22830
22831  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
22832
22833  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
22834
22835  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
22836
22837  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
22838
22839  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
22840
22841  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
22842
22843  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
22844
22845  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
22846
22847  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (41)</a></li>
22848
22849  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
22850
22851  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
22852
22853  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (46)</a></li>
22854
22855  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
22856
22857  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
22858
22859  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (32)</a></li>
22860
22861  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
22862
22863  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
22864
22865  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
22866
22867  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (50)</a></li>
22868
22869  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
22870
22871  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (35)</a></li>
22872
22873 </ul>
22874
22875
22876     </div>
22877     <p style="text-align: right">
22878  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
22879 </p>
22880
22881   </body>
22882 </html>