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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/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         15th September 2012
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>After the
  32 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
  33 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
  34 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
  35 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
  36 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
  37 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
  38 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
  39 was
  40 <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
  41 formal working group should be formed.</p>
  42
  43 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
  44 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
  45 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
  46 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
  47 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
  48 multimedia formats in the past requiring royalty payments, I suspect
  49 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
  50 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
  51
  52 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
  53 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
  54 IETF.</p>
  55
  56       </div>
  57       <div class="tags">
  58
  59
  60         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>.
  61
  62
  63       </div>
  64     </div>
  65     <div class="padding"></div>
  66
  67     <div class="entry">
  68       <div class="title">
  69         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
  70       </div>
  71       <div class="date">
  72         12th September 2012
  73       </div>
  74       <div class="body">
  75         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
  76 publication of of
  77 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
  78 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
  79 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
  80 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
  81 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
  82 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
  83 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
  84 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
  85 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
  86 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
  87
  88 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
  89 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
  90 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
  91 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
  92
  93 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
  94 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
  95
  96       </div>
  97       <div class="tags">
  98
  99
 100         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>.
 101
 102
 103       </div>
 104     </div>
 105     <div class="padding"></div>
 106
 107     <div class="entry">
 108       <div class="title">
 109         <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>
 110       </div>
 111       <div class="date">
 112          7th September 2012
 113       </div>
 114       <div class="body">
 115         <p>As I
 116 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
 117 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
 118 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
 119 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
 120 repository for the project</a>.</p>
 121
 122 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
 123 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
 124 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
 125 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
 126
 127 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
 128 PostScript formats at
 129 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
 130 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
 131
 132       </div>
 133       <div class="tags">
 134
 135
 136         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>.
 137
 138
 139       </div>
 140     </div>
 141     <div class="padding"></div>
 142
 143     <div class="entry">
 144       <div class="title">
 145         <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>
 146       </div>
 147       <div class="date">
 148         23rd August 2012
 149       </div>
 150       <div class="body">
 151         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
 152 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
 153 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
 154 revisit the great site
 155 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
 156 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
 157 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
 158
 159       </div>
 160       <div class="tags">
 161
 162
 163         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>.
 164
 165
 166       </div>
 167     </div>
 168     <div class="padding"></div>
 169
 170     <div class="entry">
 171       <div class="title">
 172         <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>
 173       </div>
 174       <div class="date">
 175         17th August 2012
 176       </div>
 177       <div class="body">
 178         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
 179 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
 180 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
 181 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
 182 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
 183 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
 184 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
 185 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
 186 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
 187 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
 188 summer I
 189 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
 190 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
 191 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
 192
 193 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
 194 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
 195 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
 196 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
 197 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
 198 progress:</p>
 199
 200 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
 201
 202 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
 203 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
 204 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
 205 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
 206 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
 207 english version of the docbook source.</p>
 208
 209 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
 210 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
 211 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
 212 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
 213 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
 214 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
 215 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
 216 project files currently available from <a
 217 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
 218
 219 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
 220 the updated
 221 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
 222 and
 223 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
 224 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
 225 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
 226 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
 227
 228       </div>
 229       <div class="tags">
 230
 231
 232         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>.
 233
 234
 235       </div>
 236     </div>
 237     <div class="padding"></div>
 238
 239     <div class="entry">
 240       <div class="title">
 241         <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>
 242       </div>
 243       <div class="date">
 244         10th August 2012
 245       </div>
 246       <div class="body">
 247         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
 248 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
 249 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
 250 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
 251 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
 252 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
 253 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
 254 case for the language
 255 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
 256 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
 257
 258 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
 259 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
 260 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
 261 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
 262 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
 263
 264 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
 265 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
 266 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
 267 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
 268 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
 269 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
 270 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
 271 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
 272 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
 273 alias for 'nb'.</p>
 274
 275 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
 276 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
 277 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
 278 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
 279 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
 280 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
 281 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
 282 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
 283 at the same time. :(</p>
 284
 285 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
 286 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
 287 processors. :(</p>
 288
 289 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
 290
 291       </div>
 292       <div class="tags">
 293
 294
 295         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>.
 296
 297
 298       </div>
 299     </div>
 300     <div class="padding"></div>
 301
 302     <div class="entry">
 303       <div class="title">
 304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
 305       </div>
 306       <div class="date">
 307         31st July 2012
 308       </div>
 309       <div class="body">
 310         <p>I tried to send this text to the
 311 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
 312 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
 313 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
 314 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
 315 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
 316 out.</p>
 317
 318 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
 319 learning curve at the moment.</p>
 320
 321 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
 322 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
 323 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
 324 available from
 325 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
 326 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
 327 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
 328 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
 329 Squeeze.</p>
 330
 331 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
 332 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
 333 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
 334 problems.</p>
 335
 336 <ul>
 337
 338 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
 339    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
 340    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
 341    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
 342    index references spanning several pages (See
 343    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
 344    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
 345    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
 346
 347 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
 348    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
 349    #683163</a>).</li>
 350
 351 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
 352    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
 353    footnote and text body, see
 354    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
 355    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
 356    refs listed are not right).</li>
 357
 358 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
 359
 360 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
 361    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
 362
 363 </ul>
 364
 365 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
 366 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
 367 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
 368
 369 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
 370
 371       </div>
 372       <div class="tags">
 373
 374
 375         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>.
 376
 377
 378       </div>
 379     </div>
 380     <div class="padding"></div>
 381
 382     <div class="entry">
 383       <div class="title">
 384         <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>
 385       </div>
 386       <div class="date">
 387         21st July 2012
 388       </div>
 389       <div class="body">
 390         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
 391 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
 392 norwegian version</a> of the book
 393 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
 394 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
 395 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
 396 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
 397 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
 398
 399 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
 400 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
 401 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
 402 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
 403 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
 404 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
 405 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
 406 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
 407 print. :)</p>
 408
 409 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
 410 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
 411 language.</p>
 412
 413       </div>
 414       <div class="tags">
 415
 416
 417         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>.
 418
 419
 420       </div>
 421     </div>
 422     <div class="padding"></div>
 423
 424     <div class="entry">
 425       <div class="title">
 426         <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>
 427       </div>
 428       <div class="date">
 429         16th July 2012
 430       </div>
 431       <div class="body">
 432         <p>I am currently working on a
 433 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
 434 to translate</a> the book
 435 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
 436 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
 437 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
 438 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
 439 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
 440 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
 441 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
 442
 443 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
 444 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
 445 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
 446 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
 447 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
 448 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
 449 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
 450 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
 451 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
 452
 453       </div>
 454       <div class="tags">
 455
 456
 457         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>.
 458
 459
 460       </div>
 461     </div>
 462     <div class="padding"></div>
 463
 464     <div class="entry">
 465       <div class="title">
 466         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
 467       </div>
 468       <div class="date">
 469          9th July 2012
 470       </div>
 471       <div class="body">
 472         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
 473 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
 474 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
 475 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
 476 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
 477 to adjust and scale the just released
 478 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
 479 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
 480 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
 481
 482 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
 483
 484 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
 485 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
 486 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
 487 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
 488 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
 489 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
 490 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
 491 perspective when working with IT.</p>
 492
 493 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
 494 project?</strong></p>
 495
 496 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
 497 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
 498 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
 499 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
 500 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
 501 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
 502
 503 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
 504 Edu?</strong></p>
 505
 506 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
 507 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
 508 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
 509 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
 510 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
 511 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
 512 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
 513 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
 514 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
 515 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
 516 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
 517 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
 518 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
 519 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
 520 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
 521 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
 522 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
 523 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
 524 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
 525 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
 526 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
 527 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
 528 quicker to update.
 529
 530 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
 531 Edu?</strong></p>
 532
 533 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
 534 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
 535 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
 536 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
 537 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
 538 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
 539
 540 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
 541 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
 542 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
 543 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
 544 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
 545 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
 546 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
 547 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
 548 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
 549 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
 550 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
 551 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
 552 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
 553 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
 554 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
 555
 556 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
 557 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
 558 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
 559 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
 560 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
 561 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
 562 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
 563 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
 564
 565 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
 566 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
 567 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
 568 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
 569 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
 570 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
 571 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
 572 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
 573 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
 574 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
 575 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
 576 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
 577 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
 578 sound file.</p>
 579
 580 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
 581 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
 582 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
 583 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
 584 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
 585 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
 586 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
 587 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
 588 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
 589
 590 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 591
 592 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
 593 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
 594 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
 595 )</p>
 596
 597 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 598 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 599
 600 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
 601 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
 602 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
 603 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
 604 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
 605 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
 606 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
 607 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
 608 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
 609 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
 610 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
 611 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
 612 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
 613 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
 614 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
 615
 616 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
 617 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
 618 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
 619 management with Airtime</a>,
 620 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
 621 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
 622 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
 623 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
 624 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
 625
 626       </div>
 627       <div class="tags">
 628
 629
 630         Tags: <a href="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>.
 631
 632
 633       </div>
 634     </div>
 635     <div class="padding"></div>
 636
 637     <div class="entry">
 638       <div class="title">
 639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
 640       </div>
 641       <div class="date">
 642          8th July 2012
 643       </div>
 644       <div class="body">
 645         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
 646 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
 647 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
 648 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
 649 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
 650 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
 651 Steinberg in his blog post
 652 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
 653 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
 654 spending of your tax money.</p>
 655
 656 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
 657 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
 658 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
 659 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
 660 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
 661 purchases.</p>
 662
 663       </div>
 664       <div class="tags">
 665
 666
 667         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 668
 669
 670       </div>
 671     </div>
 672     <div class="padding"></div>
 673
 674     <div class="entry">
 675       <div class="title">
 676         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
 677       </div>
 678       <div class="date">
 679          7th July 2012
 680       </div>
 681       <div class="body">
 682         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
 683 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
 684 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
 685 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
 686 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
 687 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
 688 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
 689 receive.  The software is
 690
 691 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
 692 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
 693 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
 694 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
 695 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
 696 Windows</a>.</p>
 697
 698 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
 699 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
 700
 701 <p><ul>
 702
 703   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
 704     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
 705
 706   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
 707     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
 708     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
 709     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
 710     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
 711     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
 712     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
 713     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
 714     </li>
 715
 716   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
 717     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
 718
 719   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
 720     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
 721
 722   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
 723     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
 724
 725   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
 726
 727   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
 728     formats </li>
 729
 730   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
 731     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
 732     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
 733     (as separate sets)</li>
 734
 735   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
 736     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
 737     percentage)</li>
 738
 739   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
 740     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
 741     memory):
 742     <ul>
 743       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
 744       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
 745       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
 746       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
 747       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
 748       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
 749       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
 750       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
 751       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
 752       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
 753           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
 754           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
 755           activity)</li>
 756       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
 757       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
 758     </ul></li>
 759
 760   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
 761     <ul>
 762       <li>Break periods</li>
 763       <li>For teacher(s):
 764         <ul>
 765           <li>Not available periods</li>
 766           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
 767           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
 768           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
 769           <li>Min hours daily</li>
 770           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
 771
 772           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
 773             days per week</li>
 774         </ul></li>
 775       <li>For students (sets):
 776         <ul>
 777           <li>Not available periods</li>
 778           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
 779           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
 780           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
 781           <li>Min hours daily</li>
 782           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
 783
 784           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
 785             days per week</li>
 786         </ul></li>
 787       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
 788         <ul>
 789           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
 790           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
 791           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
 792           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
 793           <li>End(s) students day</li>
 794           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
 795           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
 796             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
 797           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
 798           <li>Not overlapping</li>
 799           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
 800           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
 801         </ul></li>
 802     </ul></li>
 803
 804   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
 805     <ul>
 806       <li>Room not available periods</li>
 807       <li>For teacher(s):
 808         <ul>
 809           <li>Home room(s)</li>
 810           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
 811           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
 812         </ul>
 813       </li>
 814
 815       <li>For students (sets):
 816         <ul>
 817           <li>Home room(s)</li>
 818           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
 819           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
 820         </ul>
 821       </li>
 822       <li>Preferred room(s):
 823         <ul>
 824           <li>For a subject</li>
 825           <li>For an activity tag</li>
 826           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
 827           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
 828         </ul>
 829       </li>
 830
 831       <li>For a set of activities:
 832         <ul>
 833           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
 834         </ul>
 835       </li>
 836     </ul>
 837   </li>
 838 </ul></p>
 839
 840 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
 841 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
 842 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
 843 manually, check it out.
 844
 845 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
 846 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
 847 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
 848 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
 849 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
 850 section</a>.</p>
 851
 852       </div>
 853       <div class="tags">
 854
 855
 856         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 857
 858
 859       </div>
 860     </div>
 861     <div class="padding"></div>
 862
 863     <div class="entry">
 864       <div class="title">
 865         <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>
 866       </div>
 867       <div class="date">
 868          3rd July 2012
 869       </div>
 870       <div class="body">
 871         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
 872 project (Norwegian version of
 873 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
 874 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
 875 a problem with the municipalities using
 876 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
 877 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
 878 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
 879 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
 880 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
 881 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
 882 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
 883 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
 884 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
 885 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
 886 the From: header.</p>
 887
 888 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
 889 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
 890 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
 891 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
 892 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
 893 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
 894 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
 895 behaviour.</p>
 896
 897 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
 898 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
 899 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
 900 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
 901 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
 902 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
 903 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
 904
 905       </div>
 906       <div class="tags">
 907
 908
 909         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>.
 910
 911
 912       </div>
 913     </div>
 914     <div class="padding"></div>
 915
 916     <div class="entry">
 917       <div class="title">
 918         <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>
 919       </div>
 920       <div class="date">
 921         26th June 2012
 922       </div>
 923       <div class="body">
 924         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
 925 another interview with the people behind
 926 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
 927 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
 928 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
 929 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
 930 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
 931 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
 932 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
 933
 934 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
 935
 936 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
 937 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
 938 ICT in schools</p>
 939
 940 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
 941 project?</strong></p>
 942
 943 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
 944 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
 945 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
 946 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
 947
 948 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
 949 Edu?</strong></p>
 950
 951 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
 952 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
 953 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
 954 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
 955
 956 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
 957 Edu?</strong></p>
 958
 959 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
 960 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
 961 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
 962 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
 963 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
 964 technologies in school.</p>
 965
 966 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 967
 968 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
 969 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
 970 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
 971
 972 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 973 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 974
 975 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
 976 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
 977 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
 978 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
 979
 980 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
 981 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
 982 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
 983
 984 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
 985 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
 986 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
 987 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
 988 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
 989 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
 990 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
 991 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
 992 working there.</p>
 993
 994       </div>
 995       <div class="tags">
 996
 997
 998         Tags: <a href="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>.
 999
1000
1001       </div>
1002     </div>
1003     <div class="padding"></div>
1004
1005     <div class="entry">
1006       <div class="title">
1007         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
1008       </div>
1009       <div class="date">
1010         24th June 2012
1011       </div>
1012       <div class="body">
1013         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
1014 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
1015 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
1016 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
1017 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
1018 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
1019 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
1020 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
1021 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
1022 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
1023 missing in my book.</p>
1024
1025 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
1026 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
1027 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
1028 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
1029 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
1030 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
1031 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
1032
1033       </div>
1034       <div class="tags">
1035
1036
1037         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>.
1038
1039
1040       </div>
1041     </div>
1042     <div class="padding"></div>
1043
1044     <div class="entry">
1045       <div class="title">
1046         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html">Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</a>
1047       </div>
1048       <div class="date">
1049         11th June 2012
1050       </div>
1051       <div class="body">
1052         <p>During my work on
1053 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
1054 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
1055 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
1056 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
1057 explanation.</p>
1058
1059 <p><ul>
1060
1061 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
1062 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
1063 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
1064 system depend on tasksel tasks in
1065 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
1066 installation.</li>
1067
1068 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
1069 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
1070 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
1071 at least try to enable it for these services:
1072 <ul>
1073
1074   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
1075     quotas.</li>
1076   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
1077   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
1078   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
1079   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
1080   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
1081
1082 </ul></li>
1083
1084 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
1085 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
1086 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
1087 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
1088
1089 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
1090 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
1091 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
1092
1093 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
1094 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
1095 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
1096 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
1097 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
1098 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
1099
1100 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
1101 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
1102 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
1103 in Wheezy.
1104
1105 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
1106 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
1107 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
1108
1109 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
1110 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
1111 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
1112 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
1113
1114 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
1115 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
1116 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
1117 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
1118
1119 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
1120 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
1121 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
1122
1123 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
1124 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
1125 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
1126
1127 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
1128 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
1129 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
1130 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
1131 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
1132
1133 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
1134 <ul>
1135
1136 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
1137 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
1138 <li>and probably more?</li>
1139 </ul></li>
1140
1141 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
1142 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
1143 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
1144 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
1145 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
1146 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
1147 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
1148 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
1149
1150
1151 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
1152 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
1153 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
1154 use.</li>
1155
1156 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
1157 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
1158 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
1159 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
1160 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
1161
1162 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
1163 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
1164 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
1165 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
1166 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
1167 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
1168
1169 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
1170 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
1171 There are at least three implementations,
1172 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
1173 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
1174 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
1175 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
1176 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
1177 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
1178 given room.</li>
1179
1180 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
1181 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
1182 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
1183 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
1184 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
1185 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
1186 investigated.</li>
1187
1188 </ul></p>
1189
1190 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
1191 version.</p>
1192
1193       </div>
1194       <div class="tags">
1195
1196
1197         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1198
1199
1200       </div>
1201     </div>
1202     <div class="padding"></div>
1203
1204     <div class="entry">
1205       <div class="title">
1206         <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>
1207       </div>
1208       <div class="date">
1209          9th June 2012
1210       </div>
1211       <div class="body">
1212         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
1213 <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
1214 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
1215 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
1216 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
1217 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
1218 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
1219 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
1220 be willing to pay for.</p>
1221
1222 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
1223 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
1224 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
1225 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
1226 Orwell</a>.</p>
1227
1228       </div>
1229       <div class="tags">
1230
1231
1232         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>.
1233
1234
1235       </div>
1236     </div>
1237     <div class="padding"></div>
1238
1239     <div class="entry">
1240       <div class="title">
1241         <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>
1242       </div>
1243       <div class="date">
1244          6th June 2012
1245       </div>
1246       <div class="body">
1247         <p>A few days ago
1248 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
1249 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
1250 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
1251 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
1252 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
1253 code for HP, Dell and IBM
1254 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
1255 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
1256 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
1257 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
1258 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
1259
1260 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
1261 output:
1262
1263 <blockquote><pre>
1264 % 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>
1265 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": ""})
1266 %
1267 </pre></blockquote>
1268
1269 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
1270 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
1271 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
1272
1273       </div>
1274       <div class="tags">
1275
1276
1277         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>.
1278
1279
1280       </div>
1281     </div>
1282     <div class="padding"></div>
1283
1284     <div class="entry">
1285       <div class="title">
1286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
1287       </div>
1288       <div class="date">
1289          2nd June 2012
1290       </div>
1291       <div class="body">
1292         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
1293 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
1294 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
1295 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
1296 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
1297 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
1298
1299 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
1300
1301 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
1302 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
1303 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
1304 by Angela).</p>
1305
1306 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
1307 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
1308 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
1309 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
1310 becoming an osteopath.</p>
1311
1312 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
1313 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
1314 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
1315 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
1316 skills with communication skills.</p>
1317
1318 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
1319 project?</strong></p>
1320
1321 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
1322 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
1323 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
1324 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
1325 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
1326
1327 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
1328 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
1329 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
1330 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
1331 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
1332 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
1333 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
1334 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
1335 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
1336
1337 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
1338 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
1339 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
1340
1341 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
1342
1343 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
1344 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
1345 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
1346 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
1347 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
1348 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
1349 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
1350 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
1351 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
1352 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
1353 point.</p>
1354
1355 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
1356 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
1357 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
1358 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
1359 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
1360 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
1361
1362 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
1363 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
1364 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
1365 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
1366 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
1367 spare time.</p>
1368
1369 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
1370 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
1371 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
1372 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
1373 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
1374
1375 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
1376 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
1377 avoidance do exist.</p>
1378
1379 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
1380 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
1381 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
1382 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
1383 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
1384 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
1385 and probably a gain for all.</p>
1386
1387 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
1388 Edu?</strong></p>
1389
1390 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
1391 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
1392 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
1393 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
1394 project communication, honest communication within the group of
1395 developers, etc.</p>
1396
1397 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
1398 Edu?</strong></p>
1399
1400 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
1401
1402 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
1403 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
1404 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
1405 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
1406 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
1407 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
1408 contribute).</p>
1409
1410 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
1411 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
1412 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
1413 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
1414 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
1415 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
1416 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
1417 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
1418 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
1419 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
1420
1421 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
1422
1423 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
1424
1425 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
1426 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
1427 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
1428
1429 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
1430 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
1431 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
1432 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
1433
1434 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
1435 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
1436 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
1437 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
1438 whiteboard.</p>
1439
1440 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
1441
1442 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1443 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
1444
1445 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
1446 enrol people.</p>
1447
1448       </div>
1449       <div class="tags">
1450
1451
1452         Tags: <a href="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>.
1453
1454
1455       </div>
1456     </div>
1457     <div class="padding"></div>
1458
1459     <div class="entry">
1460       <div class="title">
1461         <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>
1462       </div>
1463       <div class="date">
1464          1st June 2012
1465       </div>
1466       <div class="body">
1467         <p>A few years ago I wrote
1468 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
1469 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
1470 I have learned from colleges here at the
1471 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
1472 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
1473 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
1474 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
1475 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
1476
1477 <p><pre>
1478 use strict;
1479 use warnings;
1480 use SOAP::Lite;
1481 use Data::Dumper;
1482 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
1483 my $App = 'test';
1484 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
1485 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
1486 my $s = SOAP::Lite
1487     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
1488     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
1489     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
1490     ;
1491 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
1492     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
1493     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
1494     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
1495 );
1496 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
1497 </pre></p>
1498
1499 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
1500
1501 <p><pre>
1502 $VAR1 = {
1503           'Asset' => {
1504                      'Entitlements' => {
1505                                        'EntitlementData' => [
1506                                                             {
1507                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
1508                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
1509                                                               'Provider' => '',
1510                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
1511                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
1512                                                             },
1513                                                             {
1514                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
1515                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
1516                                                               'Provider' => '',
1517                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
1518                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
1519                                                             },
1520                                                             {
1521                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
1522                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
1523                                                               'Provider' => '',
1524                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
1525                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
1526                                                             }
1527                                                           ]
1528                                      },
1529                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
1530                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
1531                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
1532                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
1533                                           'Buid' => '2323',
1534                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
1535                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
1536                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
1537                                         }
1538                    }
1539         };
1540 </pre></p>
1541
1542 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
1543 service outside the
1544 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
1545 documentation</a>, and according to
1546 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
1547 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
1548 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
1549
1550 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
1551 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
1552
1553       </div>
1554       <div class="tags">
1555
1556
1557         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>.
1558
1559
1560       </div>
1561     </div>
1562     <div class="padding"></div>
1563
1564     <div class="entry">
1565       <div class="title">
1566         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
1567       </div>
1568       <div class="date">
1569         31st May 2012
1570       </div>
1571       <div class="body">
1572         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
1573 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
1574 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
1575 running Debian Squeeze, where
1576 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
1577 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
1578 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
1579 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
1580 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
1581 another day.</p>
1582
1583 <p>After calibration, I get a
1584 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
1585 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
1586 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
1587 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
1588 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
1589 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
1590 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
1591 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
1592 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
1593 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
1594 and a simple</p>
1595
1596 <p><pre>
1597 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
1598 </pre></p>
1599
1600 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
1601 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
1602 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
1603 enough for now.</p>
1604
1605       </div>
1606       <div class="tags">
1607
1608
1609         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1610
1611
1612       </div>
1613     </div>
1614     <div class="padding"></div>
1615
1616     <div class="entry">
1617       <div class="title">
1618         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
1619       </div>
1620       <div class="date">
1621         27th May 2012
1622       </div>
1623       <div class="body">
1624         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
1625 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
1626 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
1627 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
1628 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
1629 since then, helping to make sure the
1630 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
1631 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
1632
1633 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
1634
1635 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
1636 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
1637 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
1638 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
1639 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
1640 our computer network.</p>
1641
1642 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
1643 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
1644 (4 months).</p>
1645
1646 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
1647 project?</strong></p>
1648
1649 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
1650 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
1651 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
1652 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
1653 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
1654 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
1655 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
1656 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
1657 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
1658 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
1659 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
1660 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
1661 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
1662 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
1663
1664 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
1665 Edu?</strong></p>
1666
1667 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
1668 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
1669 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
1670 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
1671 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
1672 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
1673 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
1674 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
1675
1676 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
1677 Edu?</strong></p>
1678
1679 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
1680 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
1681 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
1682 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
1683 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
1684 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
1685 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
1686 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
1687 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
1688 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
1689 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
1690 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
1691
1692 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
1693
1694 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
1695 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
1696 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
1697
1698 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1699 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
1700
1701 <p><ol>
1702
1703 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
1704 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
1705 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
1706 developing.</li>
1707
1708 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
1709 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
1710 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
1711 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
1712 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
1713
1714 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
1715 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
1716 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
1717
1718 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
1719 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
1720 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
1721 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
1722
1723 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
1724 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
1725 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
1726
1727 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
1728
1729 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
1730 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
1731 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
1732 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
1733
1734 </ol></p>
1735
1736       </div>
1737       <div class="tags">
1738
1739
1740         Tags: <a href="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>.
1741
1742
1743       </div>
1744     </div>
1745     <div class="padding"></div>
1746
1747     <div class="entry">
1748       <div class="title">
1749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
1750       </div>
1751       <div class="date">
1752         26th May 2012
1753       </div>
1754       <div class="body">
1755         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
1756 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
1757 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
1758 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
1759 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
1760
1761 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
1762 <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>
1763 comment:</p>
1764
1765 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
1766 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
1767 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
1768 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
1769 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
1770 </blockquote></p>
1771
1772 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
1773 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
1774 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
1775 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
1776 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
1777 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
1778 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
1779 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
1780 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
1781 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
1782 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
1783 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
1784 of wasted effort.</p>
1785
1786 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
1787 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
1788 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
1789
1790 <p>See
1791 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
1792 and
1793 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
1794 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
1795 </blockquote></p>
1796
1797       </div>
1798       <div class="tags">
1799
1800
1801         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>.
1802
1803
1804       </div>
1805     </div>
1806     <div class="padding"></div>
1807
1808     <div class="entry">
1809       <div class="title">
1810         <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>
1811       </div>
1812       <div class="date">
1813         18th May 2012
1814       </div>
1815       <div class="body">
1816         <p>In january, I
1817 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
1818 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
1819 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
1820 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
1821 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
1822 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
1823 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
1824 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
1825 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
1826 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
1827
1828 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
1829 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
1830 drivers. :)</p>
1831
1832       </div>
1833       <div class="tags">
1834
1835
1836         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1837
1838
1839       </div>
1840     </div>
1841     <div class="padding"></div>
1842
1843     <div class="entry">
1844       <div class="title">
1845         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
1846       </div>
1847       <div class="date">
1848         13th May 2012
1849       </div>
1850       <div class="body">
1851         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
1852 publish another interview with the people behind
1853 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
1854 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
1855 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
1856 details get right before release.
1857
1858 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
1859
1860 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
1861 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
1862 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
1863 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
1864 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
1865 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
1866 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
1867 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
1868
1869 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
1870 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
1871 home since 2006.</p>
1872
1873 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
1874 project?</strong></p>
1875
1876 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
1877 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
1878 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
1879 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
1880 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
1881 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
1882
1883 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
1884 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
1885 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
1886 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
1887 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
1888 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
1889 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
1890 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
1891 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
1892 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
1893 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
1894 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
1895 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
1896 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
1897 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
1898 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
1899
1900 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
1901 Edu?</strong></p>
1902
1903 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
1904 for me as today.</p>
1905
1906 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
1907
1908 <p><ul>
1909
1910 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
1911 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
1912
1913 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
1914 cost.</li>
1915
1916 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
1917 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
1918 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
1919 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
1920 server</li>
1921
1922 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
1923 school.</li>
1924
1925 </ul></p>
1926
1927 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
1928 came up in this way:</p>
1929
1930 <p><ul>
1931
1932 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
1933 now.</li>
1934
1935 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
1936 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
1937 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
1938
1939 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
1940 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
1941 interfaces used in the past.</li>
1942
1943 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
1944 different needs.</li>
1945
1946 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
1947
1948 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
1949 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
1950 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
1951
1952 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
1953 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
1954
1955 </ul></p>
1956
1957 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
1958 Edu?</strong></p>
1959
1960 <p><ul>
1961
1962 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
1963 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
1964 whole municipality areas.</li>
1965
1966 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
1967 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
1968 politicians.</li>
1969
1970 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
1971
1972 </ul></p>
1973
1974 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
1975
1976 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
1977 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
1978 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
1979 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
1980 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
1981 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
1982
1983 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
1984 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
1985 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
1986 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
1987 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
1988
1989 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1990 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
1991
1992 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
1993 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
1994 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
1995
1996       </div>
1997       <div class="tags">
1998
1999
2000         Tags: <a href="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>.
2001
2002
2003       </div>
2004     </div>
2005     <div class="padding"></div>
2006
2007     <div class="entry">
2008       <div class="title">
2009         <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>
2010       </div>
2011       <div class="date">
2012         30th April 2012
2013       </div>
2014       <div class="body">
2015         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
2016 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
2017
2018 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
2019 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
2020 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
2021 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
2022 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
2023 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
2024 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
2025 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
2026 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
2027 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
2028 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
2029 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
2030 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
2031 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
2032 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
2033 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
2034
2035 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
2036 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
2037 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
2038 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
2039 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
2040 finally found a Danish supplier
2041 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
2042 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
2043 days ago.</p>
2044
2045 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
2046 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
2047 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
2048 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
2049 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
2050 toys.</p>
2051
2052       </div>
2053       <div class="tags">
2054
2055
2056         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2057
2058
2059       </div>
2060     </div>
2061     <div class="padding"></div>
2062
2063     <div class="entry">
2064       <div class="title">
2065         <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>
2066       </div>
2067       <div class="date">
2068         26th April 2012
2069       </div>
2070       <div class="body">
2071         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
2072 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
2073 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
2074 that the video editor application included with
2075 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
2076 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
2077 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
2078
2079 <p><blockquote>
2080 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
2081 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
2082 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
2083 </blockquote></p>
2084
2085 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
2086
2087 <p><blockquote>
2088 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
2089 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
2090 </blockquote></p>
2091
2092 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
2093 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
2094 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
2095 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
2096 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
2097 video.  AMR is
2098 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
2099 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
2100 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
2101 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
2102 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
2103 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
2104 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
2105
2106 <p>I know why I prefer
2107 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
2108 standards</a> also for video.</p>
2109
2110       </div>
2111       <div class="tags">
2112
2113
2114         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>.
2115
2116
2117       </div>
2118     </div>
2119     <div class="padding"></div>
2120
2121     <div class="entry">
2122       <div class="title">
2123         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
2124       </div>
2125       <div class="date">
2126         19th April 2012
2127       </div>
2128       <div class="body">
2129         <p>Here in Norway, the
2130 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
2131 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
2132 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
2133 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
2134 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
2135 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
2136 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
2137 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
2138 on the same level.</p>
2139
2140 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
2141 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
2142 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
2143 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
2144 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
2145 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
2146 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
2147 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
2148 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
2149 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
2150 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
2151 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
2152 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
2153 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
2154 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
2155 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
2156 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
2157 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
2158
2159 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
2160 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
2161 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
2162 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
2163 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
2164 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
2165 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
2166 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
2167
2168 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
2169 from Simon Phipps
2170 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
2171 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
2172
2173 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
2174 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
2175 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
2176 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
2177 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
2178 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
2179 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
2180 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
2181 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
2182
2183       </div>
2184       <div class="tags">
2185
2186
2187         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>.
2188
2189
2190       </div>
2191     </div>
2192     <div class="padding"></div>
2193
2194     <div class="entry">
2195       <div class="title">
2196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
2197       </div>
2198       <div class="date">
2199         15th April 2012
2200       </div>
2201       <div class="body">
2202         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
2203 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
2204 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
2205 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
2206 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
2207 up in the recently released
2208 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
2209 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
2210
2211 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2212
2213 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
2214 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
2215 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
2216 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
2217 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
2218 information technology and science/technology.</p>
2219
2220 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2221 project?</strong></p>
2222
2223 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
2224 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
2225 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
2226 contributing.</p>
2227
2228 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2229 Edu?</strong></p>
2230
2231 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
2232 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
2233 Debian Project!</p>
2234
2235 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2236 Edu?</strong></p>
2237
2238 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
2239 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
2240 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
2241 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
2242 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
2243 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
2244 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
2245
2246 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
2247 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
2248
2249 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2250
2251 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
2252 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
2253 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
2254 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
2255
2256 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2257 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2258
2259 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
2260 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
2261 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
2262 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
2263 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
2264 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
2265 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
2266
2267 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
2268 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
2269 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
2270 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
2271 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
2272 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
2273 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
2274 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
2275
2276       </div>
2277       <div class="tags">
2278
2279
2280         Tags: <a href="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>.
2281
2282
2283       </div>
2284     </div>
2285     <div class="padding"></div>
2286
2287     <div class="entry">
2288       <div class="title">
2289         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
2290       </div>
2291       <div class="date">
2292          8th April 2012
2293       </div>
2294       <div class="body">
2295         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
2296 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
2297 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
2298 contributor to the
2299 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
2300 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
2301
2302 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2303
2304 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
2305 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
2306
2307 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2308 project?</strong></p>
2309
2310 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
2311 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
2312 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
2313 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
2314 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
2315 "localisation".</p>
2316
2317 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2318 Edu?</strong></p>
2319
2320 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2321 Edu?</strong></p>
2322
2323 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
2324 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
2325 education system.</p>
2326
2327 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
2328 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
2329 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
2330 money on the latest hardware.</p>
2331
2332 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2333
2334 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
2335 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
2336 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
2337
2338 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2339 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2340
2341 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
2342 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
2343 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
2344
2345       </div>
2346       <div class="tags">
2347
2348
2349         Tags: <a href="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>.
2350
2351
2352       </div>
2353     </div>
2354     <div class="padding"></div>
2355
2356     <div class="entry">
2357       <div class="title">
2358         <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>
2359       </div>
2360       <div class="date">
2361          6th April 2012
2362       </div>
2363       <div class="body">
2364         <p>Recently I have spent time with
2365 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
2366 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
2367 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
2368 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
2369 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
2370 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
2371 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
2372 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
2373
2374 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
2375 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
2376 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
2377 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
2378 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
2379 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
2380 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
2381 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
2382
2383 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
2384 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
2385 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
2386 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
2387 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
2388 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
2389 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
2390 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
2391
2392 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
2393 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
2394 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
2395 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
2396 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
2397 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
2398 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
2399 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
2400 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
2401 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
2402
2403 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
2404 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
2405 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
2406 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
2407
2408 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
2409 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
2410
2411       </div>
2412       <div class="tags">
2413
2414
2415         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2416
2417
2418       </div>
2419     </div>
2420     <div class="padding"></div>
2421
2422     <div class="entry">
2423       <div class="title">
2424         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
2425       </div>
2426       <div class="date">
2427          5th April 2012
2428       </div>
2429       <div class="body">
2430         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
2431 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
2432 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
2433 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
2434 for schools.  Check out his article
2435 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
2436 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
2437
2438       </div>
2439       <div class="tags">
2440
2441
2442         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2443
2444
2445       </div>
2446     </div>
2447     <div class="padding"></div>
2448
2449     <div class="entry">
2450       <div class="title">
2451         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
2452       </div>
2453       <div class="date">
2454          1st April 2012
2455       </div>
2456       <div class="body">
2457         <p>Germany is a core area for the
2458 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
2459 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
2460 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
2461
2462 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2463
2464 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
2465 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
2466 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
2467 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
2468 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
2469 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
2470 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
2471 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
2472
2473 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
2474 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
2475 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
2476 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
2477 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
2478 the end of April this year.</p>
2479
2480 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2481 project?</strong></p>
2482
2483 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
2484 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
2485 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
2486 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
2487 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
2488 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
2489 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
2490 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
2491 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
2492 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
2493 Skolelinux.</p>
2494
2495 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
2496 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
2497 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
2498 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
2499 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
2500 the admin teachers.</p>
2501
2502 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2503 Edu?</strong></p>
2504
2505 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
2506 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
2507 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
2508
2509 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
2510 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
2511 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
2512 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
2513 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
2514
2515 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2516 Edu?</strong></p>
2517
2518 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
2519
2520 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2521
2522 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
2523 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
2524 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
2525 LibreOffice.</p>
2526
2527 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2528 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2529
2530 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
2531 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
2532 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
2533
2534       </div>
2535       <div class="tags">
2536
2537
2538         Tags: <a href="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>.
2539
2540
2541       </div>
2542     </div>
2543     <div class="padding"></div>
2544
2545     <div class="entry">
2546       <div class="title">
2547         <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>
2548       </div>
2549       <div class="date">
2550         25th March 2012
2551       </div>
2552       <div class="body">
2553         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
2554
2555 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
2556 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
2557 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
2558 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
2559 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
2560 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
2561 and download as a
2562 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
2563 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
2564
2565 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
2566   <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"' />
2567     <p>Download video as
2568       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
2569 </video></p>
2570
2571       </div>
2572       <div class="tags">
2573
2574
2575         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2576
2577
2578       </div>
2579     </div>
2580     <div class="padding"></div>
2581
2582     <div class="entry">
2583       <div class="title">
2584         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
2585       </div>
2586       <div class="date">
2587         19th March 2012
2588       </div>
2589       <div class="body">
2590         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
2591 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
2592 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
2593 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
2594 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
2595
2596 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2597
2598 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
2599 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
2600 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
2601 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
2602 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
2603 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
2604 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
2605 installations.</p>
2606
2607 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2608 project?</strong></p>
2609
2610 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
2611 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
2612 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
2613 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
2614 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
2615 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
2616 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
2617 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
2618 these things we decided to try it.</p>
2619
2620 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2621 Edu?</strong></p>
2622
2623 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
2624 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
2625 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
2626 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
2627 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
2628 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
2629 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
2630 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
2631
2632 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2633 Edu?</strong></p>
2634
2635 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
2636 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
2637 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
2638 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
2639 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
2640
2641 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2642
2643 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
2644 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
2645 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
2646 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
2647 that counts...)</p>
2648
2649 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2650 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2651
2652 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
2653 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
2654 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
2655 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
2656 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
2657 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
2658 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
2659 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
2660 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
2661 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
2662 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
2663
2664 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
2665 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
2666 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
2667
2668       </div>
2669       <div class="tags">
2670
2671
2672         Tags: <a href="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>.
2673
2674
2675       </div>
2676     </div>
2677     <div class="padding"></div>
2678
2679     <div class="entry">
2680       <div class="title">
2681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
2682       </div>
2683       <div class="date">
2684         16th March 2012
2685       </div>
2686       <div class="body">
2687         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
2688 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
2689 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
2690 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
2691
2692 <ol>
2693
2694 <li>The documentation is written in a
2695 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
2696 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
2697 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
2698 docbook XML.</li>
2699
2700 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
2701 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
2702 with the translated text.</li>
2703
2704 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
2705 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
2706 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
2707 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
2708 images.</li>
2709
2710 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
2711 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
2712
2713 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
2714 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
2715
2716 </ol>
2717
2718 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
2719 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
2720 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
2721 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
2722 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
2723
2724 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
2725 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
2726 package</a>.</p>
2727
2728       </div>
2729       <div class="tags">
2730
2731
2732         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2733
2734
2735       </div>
2736     </div>
2737     <div class="padding"></div>
2738
2739     <div class="entry">
2740       <div class="title">
2741         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
2742       </div>
2743       <div class="date">
2744         11th March 2012
2745       </div>
2746       <div class="body">
2747         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
2748 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
2749 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
2750 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
2751 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
2752 you have not done so already.</p>
2753
2754 <p>I plan to present the new version at
2755 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
2756 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
2757 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
2758
2759       </div>
2760       <div class="tags">
2761
2762
2763         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2764
2765
2766       </div>
2767     </div>
2768     <div class="padding"></div>
2769
2770     <div class="entry">
2771       <div class="title">
2772         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
2773       </div>
2774       <div class="date">
2775          9th March 2012
2776       </div>
2777       <div class="body">
2778         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
2779 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
2780 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2781 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
2782 more international audience.</p>
2783
2784 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
2785 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
2786 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
2787 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
2788 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
2789 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
2790 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
2791
2792
2793 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2794
2795 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
2796 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
2797 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
2798 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
2799 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
2800 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
2801 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
2802 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
2803 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
2804 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
2805 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
2806
2807 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2808 project?</strong></p>
2809
2810 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
2811 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
2812 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
2813 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
2814 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
2815 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
2816 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
2817 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
2818 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
2819 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
2820 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
2821 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
2822 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
2823
2824 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2825 Edu?</strong></p>
2826
2827 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
2828 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
2829 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
2830 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
2831 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
2832 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
2833 Japan.</p>
2834
2835 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2836 Edu?</strong></p>
2837
2838 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
2839 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
2840 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
2841 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
2842 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
2843 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
2844 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
2845 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
2846 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
2847 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
2848 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
2849 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
2850 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
2851 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
2852 help.</p>
2853
2854 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2855
2856 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
2857 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
2858 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
2859 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
2860 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
2861 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
2862 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
2863 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
2864 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
2865 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
2866 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
2867
2868 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2869 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2870
2871 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
2872 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
2873 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
2874 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
2875 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
2876 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
2877 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
2878 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
2879 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
2880 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
2881 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
2882 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
2883
2884       </div>
2885       <div class="tags">
2886
2887
2888         Tags: <a href="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>.
2889
2890
2891       </div>
2892     </div>
2893     <div class="padding"></div>
2894
2895     <div class="entry">
2896       <div class="title">
2897         <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>
2898       </div>
2899       <div class="date">
2900          7th March 2012
2901       </div>
2902       <div class="body">
2903         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
2904
2905 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
2906 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
2907 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
2908 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
2909 download as a
2910 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
2911 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
2912
2913 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
2914   <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"' />
2915     <p>Download video as
2916       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
2917 </video></p>
2918
2919       </div>
2920       <div class="tags">
2921
2922
2923         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2924
2925
2926       </div>
2927     </div>
2928     <div class="padding"></div>
2929
2930     <div class="entry">
2931       <div class="title">
2932         <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>
2933       </div>
2934       <div class="date">
2935          4th March 2012
2936       </div>
2937       <div class="body">
2938         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
2939 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
2940 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
2941 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
2942 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
2943 need a software solution for your school.</p>
2944
2945       </div>
2946       <div class="tags">
2947
2948
2949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2950
2951
2952       </div>
2953     </div>
2954     <div class="padding"></div>
2955
2956     <div class="entry">
2957       <div class="title">
2958         <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>
2959       </div>
2960       <div class="date">
2961          3rd March 2012
2962       </div>
2963       <div class="body">
2964         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
2965 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
2966 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
2967 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
2968 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
2969 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
2970 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
2971 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
2972 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
2973 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
2974 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
2975 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
2976 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
2977 year...</p>
2978
2979 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
2980 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
2981 name,
2982 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
2983 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
2984 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
2985 mean). I've been following
2986 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
2987 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
2988 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
2989 Check it out. :)</p>
2990
2991       </div>
2992       <div class="tags">
2993
2994
2995         Tags: <a href="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>.
2996
2997
2998       </div>
2999     </div>
3000     <div class="padding"></div>
3001
3002     <div class="entry">
3003       <div class="title">
3004         <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>
3005       </div>
3006       <div class="date">
3007         27th February 2012
3008       </div>
3009       <div class="body">
3010         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
3011 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
3012 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
3013 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
3014 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
3015 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
3016 need a software solution for your school.</p>
3017
3018       </div>
3019       <div class="tags">
3020
3021
3022         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3023
3024
3025       </div>
3026     </div>
3027     <div class="padding"></div>
3028
3029     <div class="entry">
3030       <div class="title">
3031         <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>
3032       </div>
3033       <div class="date">
3034         19th February 2012
3035       </div>
3036       <div class="body">
3037         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
3038 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
3039 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
3040 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
3041 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
3042 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
3043 solution for your school.</p>
3044
3045       </div>
3046       <div class="tags">
3047
3048
3049         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3050
3051
3052       </div>
3053     </div>
3054     <div class="padding"></div>
3055
3056     <div class="entry">
3057       <div class="title">
3058         <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>
3059       </div>
3060       <div class="date">
3061         14th February 2012
3062       </div>
3063       <div class="body">
3064         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
3065 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
3066 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
3067 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
3068 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
3069 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
3070 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
3071 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
3072 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
3073
3074 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
3075 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
3076 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
3077 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
3078 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
3079
3080 <blockquote><pre>
3081 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
3082 do
3083     printf "Failed disk $d: "
3084     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
3085 done
3086 </blockquote></pre>
3087
3088 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
3089 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
3090
3091 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
3092
3093 <blockquote><pre>
3094 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
3095 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
3096 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
3097 </blockquote></pre>
3098
3099 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
3100 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
3101 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
3102 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
3103 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
3104 mounted inside my box.</p>
3105
3106 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
3107 Software RAID in the
3108 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
3109 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
3110 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
3111 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
3112 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
3113 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
3114
3115       </div>
3116       <div class="tags">
3117
3118
3119         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>.
3120
3121
3122       </div>
3123     </div>
3124     <div class="padding"></div>
3125
3126     <div class="entry">
3127       <div class="title">
3128         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
3129       </div>
3130       <div class="date">
3131         13th February 2012
3132       </div>
3133       <div class="body">
3134         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
3135 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
3136 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
3137 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
3138 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
3139 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
3140 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
3141 change the global proxy setting by editing
3142 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
3143 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
3144
3145 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
3146 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
3147 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
3148
3149 <blockquote><pre>
3150 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
3151 {
3152    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
3153        isPlainHostName(host) ||
3154        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
3155       return "DIRECT";
3156    else
3157       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
3158 }
3159 </pre></blockquote>
3160
3161 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
3162
3163 <blockquote><pre>
3164 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
3165 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
3166 </pre></blockquote>
3167
3168 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
3169 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
3170 would be used for
3171 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
3172 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
3173 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
3174 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
3175 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
3176 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
3177 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
3178 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
3179 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
3180 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
3181
3182 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
3183 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
3184 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
3185 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
3186 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
3187 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
3188
3189 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
3190 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
3191 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
3192 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
3193 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
3194 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
3195 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
3196 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
3197 the network setup changes.</p>
3198
3199 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
3200 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
3201 draft</a> and a
3202 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
3203 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
3204
3205       </div>
3206       <div class="tags">
3207
3208
3209         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3210
3211
3212       </div>
3213     </div>
3214     <div class="padding"></div>
3215
3216     <div class="entry">
3217       <div class="title">
3218         <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>
3219       </div>
3220       <div class="date">
3221          5th February 2012
3222       </div>
3223       <div class="body">
3224         <p>Since the Lenny version of
3225 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
3226 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
3227 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
3228 in the morning.  This is done using the
3229 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
3230
3231 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
3232 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
3233 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
3234 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
3235 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
3236 the
3237 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
3238 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
3239 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
3240 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
3241 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
3242
3243 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
3244 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
3245 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
3246 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
3247 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
3248 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
3249 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
3250
3251 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
3252 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
3253 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
3254 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
3255 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
3256
3257       </div>
3258       <div class="tags">
3259
3260
3261         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3262
3263
3264       </div>
3265     </div>
3266     <div class="padding"></div>
3267
3268     <div class="entry">
3269       <div class="title">
3270         <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>
3271       </div>
3272       <div class="date">
3273          4th February 2012
3274       </div>
3275       <div class="body">
3276         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
3277 publish the third beta version of
3278 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
3279 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
3280 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
3281 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
3282 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
3283 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
3284 on the project announcement list.</p>
3285
3286 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
3287 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
3288
3289 <ul>
3290
3291 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
3292   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
3293   the installation.</li>
3294
3295 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
3296   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
3297
3298 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
3299   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
3300   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
3301
3302 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
3303   for the local system administrator is created during installation
3304   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
3305   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
3306   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
3307   up to date on the system.</li>
3308
3309 </ul>
3310
3311 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
3312 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
3313 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
3314 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
3315
3316 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
3317 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
3318 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
3319 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
3320 will see you there?</p>
3321
3322       </div>
3323       <div class="tags">
3324
3325
3326         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3327
3328
3329       </div>
3330     </div>
3331     <div class="padding"></div>
3332
3333     <div class="entry">
3334       <div class="title">
3335         <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>
3336       </div>
3337       <div class="date">
3338         27th January 2012
3339       </div>
3340       <div class="body">
3341         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
3342 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
3343 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
3344 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
3345 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
3346 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
3347 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
3348
3349 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
3350 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
3351 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
3352 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
3353 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
3354 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
3355 not taken care of by this.</p>
3356
3357 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
3358 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
3359 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
3360 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
3361 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
3362 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
3363 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
3364 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
3365 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
3366 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
3367 firmware packages.</p>
3368
3369 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
3370 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
3371 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
3372 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
3373 initrd with extra firmware, the
3374 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
3375 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
3376 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
3377
3378 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
3379 network cards working.  For this,
3380 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
3381 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
3382 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
3383
3384 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
3385 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
3386 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
3387
3388 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
3389 try.</p>
3390
3391       </div>
3392       <div class="tags">
3393
3394
3395         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3396
3397
3398       </div>
3399     </div>
3400     <div class="padding"></div>
3401
3402     <div class="entry">
3403       <div class="title">
3404         <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>
3405       </div>
3406       <div class="date">
3407         25th January 2012
3408       </div>
3409       <div class="body">
3410         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
3411 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
3412 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
3413 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
3414 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
3415
3416 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
3417 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
3418 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
3419 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
3420 this is done, log on to the central server and run
3421 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
3422 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
3423 will look similar to this:</p>
3424
3425 <p><blockquote><pre>
3426 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
3427 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
3428 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.
3429
3430 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
3431
3432 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3433 enter password: *******
3434 %
3435 </pre></blockquote></p>
3436
3437 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
3438 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
3439 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
3440 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
3441 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
3442 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
3443 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
3444 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
3445 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
3446 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
3447 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
3448 automatically.</p>
3449
3450 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
3451 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
3452
3453 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
3454 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
3455 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
3456
3457       </div>
3458       <div class="tags">
3459
3460
3461         Tags: <a href="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>.
3462
3463
3464       </div>
3465     </div>
3466     <div class="padding"></div>
3467
3468     <div class="entry">
3469       <div class="title">
3470         <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>
3471       </div>
3472       <div class="date">
3473         10th January 2012
3474       </div>
3475       <div class="body">
3476         <p>In the Squeeze version of
3477 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
3478 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
3479 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
3480 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
3481 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
3482 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
3483 first time.</p>
3484
3485 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
3486 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
3487 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
3488 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
3489
3490 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
3491 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
3492 new setting.</p>
3493
3494 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
3495 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
3496 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
3497
3498       </div>
3499       <div class="tags">
3500
3501
3502         Tags: <a href="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>.
3503
3504
3505       </div>
3506     </div>
3507     <div class="padding"></div>
3508
3509     <div class="entry">
3510       <div class="title">
3511         <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>
3512       </div>
3513       <div class="date">
3514          7th January 2012
3515       </div>
3516       <div class="body">
3517         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
3518 the second beta version of
3519 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
3520 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
3521 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
3522 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
3523 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
3524 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
3525 on the project announcement list.</p>
3526
3527       </div>
3528       <div class="tags">
3529
3530
3531         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3532
3533
3534       </div>
3535     </div>
3536     <div class="padding"></div>
3537
3538     <div class="entry">
3539       <div class="title">
3540         <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>
3541       </div>
3542       <div class="date">
3543          3rd January 2012
3544       </div>
3545       <div class="body">
3546         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
3547 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
3548 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
3549 interesting.</p>
3550
3551 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
3552 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
3553 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
3554 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
3555 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
3556 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
3557 wrap up its tasks.</p>
3558
3559 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
3560 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
3561 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
3562 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
3563 because I was typing.</P>
3564
3565 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
3566 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
3567 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
3568 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
3569 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
3570 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
3571 generate entropy.</p>
3572
3573 <p>The fix is in
3574 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
3575 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
3576 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
3577 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
3578
3579       </div>
3580       <div class="tags">
3581
3582
3583         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3584
3585
3586       </div>
3587     </div>
3588     <div class="padding"></div>
3589
3590     <div class="entry">
3591       <div class="title">
3592         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
3593       </div>
3594       <div class="date">
3595         21st November 2011
3596       </div>
3597       <div class="body">
3598         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
3599 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
3600 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
3601 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
3602 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
3603 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
3604 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
3605 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
3606 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
3607 the tools to do so.</p>
3608
3609 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
3610 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
3611 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
3612 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
3613
3614 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
3615 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
3616 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
3617 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
3618 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
3619 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
3620 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
3621 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
3622
3623 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
3624 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
3625 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
3626
3627 <p><pre>
3628 #!/usr/bin/perl
3629 use strict;
3630 use warnings;
3631 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
3632 BEGIN {
3633     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
3634     my %rhelmodules = (
3635         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
3636         );
3637     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
3638         eval "use $module;";
3639         if ($@) {
3640             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
3641             system("yum install -y $pkg");
3642             eval "use $module;";
3643         }
3644     }
3645 }
3646 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
3647
3648 upgrade_dell();
3649
3650 exit 0;
3651
3652 sub run_firmware_script {
3653     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
3654     unless ($script) {
3655         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
3656         exit 1
3657     }
3658     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
3659
3660     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
3661         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
3662     } else {
3663         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
3664     }
3665 }
3666
3667 sub run_firmware_scripts {
3668     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
3669     # Run firmware packages
3670     for my $dir (@dirs) {
3671         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
3672         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
3673         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
3674             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
3675             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
3676         }
3677         closedir $dh;
3678     }
3679 }
3680
3681 sub download {
3682     my $url = shift;
3683     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
3684     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
3685 }
3686
3687 sub upgrade_dell {
3688     my @dirs;
3689     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
3690     chomp $product;
3691
3692     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
3693
3694         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
3695         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
3696
3697         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
3698             CLEANUP => 1
3699             );
3700         chdir($tmpdir);
3701         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
3702         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
3703         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
3704         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
3705         my $fwopts = "-q";
3706         if (@paths) {
3707             for my $url (@paths) {
3708                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
3709             }
3710             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
3711         } else {
3712             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
3713             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
3714         }
3715         chdir('/');
3716     } else {
3717         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
3718         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
3719     }
3720 }
3721
3722 sub fetch_dell_fw {
3723     my $path = shift;
3724     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
3725     download($url);
3726 }
3727
3728 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
3729 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
3730 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
3731 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
3732     my $filename = shift;
3733
3734     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
3735     chomp $product;
3736     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
3737
3738     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
3739
3740     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
3741     my @paths;
3742     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
3743         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
3744         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
3745         my $oscode;
3746         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
3747             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
3748         } else {
3749             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
3750         }
3751         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
3752         {
3753             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
3754         }
3755     }
3756     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
3757         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
3758
3759         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
3760         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
3761
3762         my $cpath = $component->{path};
3763         for my $path (@paths) {
3764             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
3765                 push(@paths, $cpath);
3766             }
3767         }
3768     }
3769     return @paths;
3770 }
3771 </pre>
3772
3773 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
3774 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
3775 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
3776 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
3777 outdated.</p>
3778
3779       </div>
3780       <div class="tags">
3781
3782
3783         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>.
3784
3785
3786       </div>
3787     </div>
3788     <div class="padding"></div>
3789
3790     <div class="entry">
3791       <div class="title">
3792         <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>
3793       </div>
3794       <div class="date">
3795          7th October 2011
3796       </div>
3797       <div class="body">
3798         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
3799 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
3800 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
3801 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
3802 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
3803 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
3804 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
3805 models.</p>
3806
3807 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
3808 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
3809 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
3810 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
3811
3812 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
3813 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
3814 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
3815 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (abount
3816 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
3817 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
3818 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
3819 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
3820 distributed.</p>
3821
3822 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
3823
3824 <ul>
3825
3826 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
3827   other relevant equipment.</li>
3828
3829 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
3830
3831 </ul>
3832
3833 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
3834 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
3835 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
3836 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
3837 books available.</p>
3838
3839 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
3840 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
3841 libraries. :)</p>
3842
3843       </div>
3844       <div class="tags">
3845
3846
3847         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>.
3848
3849
3850       </div>
3851     </div>
3852     <div class="padding"></div>
3853
3854     <div class="entry">
3855       <div class="title">
3856         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
3857       </div>
3858       <div class="date">
3859         17th September 2011
3860       </div>
3861       <div class="body">
3862         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
3863 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
3864 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
3865 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
3866 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
3867 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
3868 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
3869 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
3870
3871 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
3872
3873 <blockquote><pre>
3874 #!/bin/sh
3875 # apt-get install lsdvd
3876 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
3877 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
3878 </pre></blockquote>
3879
3880 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
3881 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
3882 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
3883 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
3884
3885 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
3886 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
3887 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
3888 back as an ISO.
3889
3890 <blockquote><pre>
3891 #!/bin/sh
3892 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
3893 set -e
3894 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
3895 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
3896 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
3897 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
3898 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
3899 </pre></blockquote>
3900
3901 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
3902
3903 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
3904 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
3905 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
3906 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
3907 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
3908
3909 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
3910 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
3911 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
3912 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
3913 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
3914 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
3915
3916       </div>
3917       <div class="tags">
3918
3919
3920         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>.
3921
3922
3923       </div>
3924     </div>
3925     <div class="padding"></div>
3926
3927     <div class="entry">
3928       <div class="title">
3929         <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>
3930       </div>
3931       <div class="date">
3932          4th August 2011
3933       </div>
3934       <div class="body">
3935         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
3936 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
3937 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
3938 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
3939 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
3940 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
3941 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
3942 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
3943 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
3944
3945 <p><blockquote>
3946 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
3947 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
3948 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
3949 </blockquote></p>
3950
3951 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
3952 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
3953 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
3954 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
3955 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
3956 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
3957 hard to explain.</p>
3958
3959 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
3960 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
3961 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
3962 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
3963 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
3964 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
3965 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
3966 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
3967 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
3968 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
3969 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
3970 mode).</p>
3971
3972 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
3973 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
3974 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
3975 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
3976 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
3977 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
3978 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
3979 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
3980 after visiting single user mode.</p>
3981
3982 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
3983 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
3984 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
3985 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
3986 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
3987 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
3988 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
3989 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
3990
3991 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
3992 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
3993 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
3994
3995       </div>
3996       <div class="tags">
3997
3998
3999         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>.
4000
4001
4002       </div>
4003     </div>
4004     <div class="padding"></div>
4005
4006     <div class="entry">
4007       <div class="title">
4008         <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>
4009       </div>
4010       <div class="date">
4011         30th July 2011
4012       </div>
4013       <div class="body">
4014         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
4015 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
4016 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
4017 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
4018 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
4019 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
4020 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
4021 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
4022 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
4023 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
4024 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
4025 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
4026 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
4027
4028 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
4029 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
4030 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
4031 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
4032 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
4033 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
4034 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
4035 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
4036 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
4037
4038 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
4039 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
4040 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
4041 is presented.</p>
4042
4043 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
4044 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
4045 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
4046 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
4047 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
4048 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
4049 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
4050 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
4051 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
4052 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
4053 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
4054 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
4055 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
4056 find time to push this forward.</p>
4057
4058       </div>
4059       <div class="tags">
4060
4061
4062         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>.
4063
4064
4065       </div>
4066     </div>
4067     <div class="padding"></div>
4068
4069     <div class="entry">
4070       <div class="title">
4071         <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>
4072       </div>
4073       <div class="date">
4074         29th July 2011
4075       </div>
4076       <div class="body">
4077         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
4078 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
4079 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
4080 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
4081 issues.</p>
4082
4083 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
4084 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
4085 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
4086
4087 <ol>
4088
4089 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
4090 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
4091 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
4092 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
4093 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
4094 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
4095 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
4096 Debian.</li>
4097
4098 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
4099 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
4100 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
4101 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
4102 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
4103 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
4104 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
4105 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
4106 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
4107 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
4108 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
4109 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
4110 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
4111
4112 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
4113 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
4114 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
4115 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
4116 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
4117 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
4118 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
4119 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
4120 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
4121 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
4122
4123 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
4124 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
4125 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
4126 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
4127 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
4128 latter behaviour.</li>
4129
4130 </ol>
4131
4132 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
4133 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
4134 it do not matter much.</p>
4135
4136 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
4137 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
4138 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
4139
4140       </div>
4141       <div class="tags">
4142
4143
4144         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>.
4145
4146
4147       </div>
4148     </div>
4149     <div class="padding"></div>
4150
4151     <div class="entry">
4152       <div class="title">
4153         <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>
4154       </div>
4155       <div class="date">
4156         26th July 2011
4157       </div>
4158       <div class="body">
4159         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
4160 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
4161 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
4162 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
4163 security support for a few years.</p>
4164
4165 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
4166 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
4167 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
4168 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
4169 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
4170 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
4171 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
4172 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
4173 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
4174 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
4175 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
4176 easier in the future.</p>
4177
4178 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
4179 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
4180 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
4181 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
4182 do not have time for.</p>
4183
4184       </div>
4185       <div class="tags">
4186
4187
4188         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>.
4189
4190
4191       </div>
4192     </div>
4193     <div class="padding"></div>
4194
4195     <div class="entry">
4196       <div class="title">
4197         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
4198       </div>
4199       <div class="date">
4200         20th June 2011
4201       </div>
4202       <div class="body">
4203         <p>Reading
4204 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
4205 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
4206 parts of the
4207 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
4208 and
4209 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
4210 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
4211 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
4212 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
4213
4214       </div>
4215       <div class="tags">
4216
4217
4218         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>.
4219
4220
4221       </div>
4222     </div>
4223     <div class="padding"></div>
4224
4225     <div class="entry">
4226       <div class="title">
4227         <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>
4228       </div>
4229       <div class="date">
4230         30th April 2011
4231       </div>
4232       <div class="body">
4233         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
4234 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
4235 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
4236 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
4237 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
4238 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
4239 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
4240 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
4241 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
4242 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
4243
4244 <p>Where is it?  Visit
4245 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
4246 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
4247 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
4248 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
4249
4250       </div>
4251       <div class="tags">
4252
4253
4254         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>.
4255
4256
4257       </div>
4258     </div>
4259     <div class="padding"></div>
4260
4261     <div class="entry">
4262       <div class="title">
4263         <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>
4264       </div>
4265       <div class="date">
4266         29th April 2011
4267       </div>
4268       <div class="body">
4269         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
4270 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
4271 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
4272 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
4273 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
4274 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
4275 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
4276 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
4277 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
4278 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
4279 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
4280 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
4281 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
4282
4283 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
4284 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
4285 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
4286 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
4287 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
4288 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
4289 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
4290 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
4291 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
4292 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
4293 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
4294 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
4295 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
4296
4297 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
4298 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
4299 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
4300 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
4301 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
4302 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
4303 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
4304 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
4305 it.</p>
4306
4307 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
4308 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
4309 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
4310 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
4311 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
4312 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
4313 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
4314
4315 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
4316 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
4317 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
4318 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
4319 and range= options.</p>
4320
4321 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
4322 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
4323 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
4324 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
4325 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
4326 to best handle this.  I've noticed
4327 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
4328 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
4329 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
4330 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
4331
4332 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
4333 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
4334 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
4335 discussions instead of only
4336 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
4337 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
4338 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
4339 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
4340 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
4341 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
4342
4343       </div>
4344       <div class="tags">
4345
4346
4347         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>.
4348
4349
4350       </div>
4351     </div>
4352     <div class="padding"></div>
4353
4354     <div class="entry">
4355       <div class="title">
4356         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
4357       </div>
4358       <div class="date">
4359          6th April 2011
4360       </div>
4361       <div class="body">
4362         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
4363 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
4364 A few days ago the project
4365 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
4366 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
4367 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
4368 into Gnash.</p>
4369
4370       </div>
4371       <div class="tags">
4372
4373
4374         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>.
4375
4376
4377       </div>
4378     </div>
4379     <div class="padding"></div>
4380
4381     <div class="entry">
4382       <div class="title">
4383         <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>
4384       </div>
4385       <div class="date">
4386          3rd April 2011
4387       </div>
4388       <div class="body">
4389         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
4390 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
4391 update in English.</p>
4392
4393 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
4394 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
4395 of the British service
4396 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
4397 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
4398 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
4399 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
4400 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
4401 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
4402 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
4403 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
4404 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
4405 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
4406 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
4407 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
4408 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
4409
4410 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
4411 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
4412 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
4413 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
4414 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
4415 public infrastructure.</p>
4416
4417 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
4418 such service?</p>
4419
4420       </div>
4421       <div class="tags">
4422
4423
4424         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>.
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/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
4434       </div>
4435       <div class="date">
4436         28th January 2011
4437       </div>
4438       <div class="body">
4439         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
4440 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
4441 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
4442 available on the Internet, and check our locally
4443 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
4444 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
4445 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
4446 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
4447 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
4448 out which security holes were present in our free software
4449 collection.</p>
4450
4451 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
4452 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
4453 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
4454 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
4455 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
4456 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
4457 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
4458 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
4459 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
4460 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
4461 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
4462 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
4463 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
4464 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
4465 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
4466 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
4467
4468 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
4469 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
4470 check out, one could look up
4471 <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
4472 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
4473 The most recent one is
4474 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
4475 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
4476 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
4477
4478 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
4479 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
4480 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
4481 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
4482 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
4483 security issues out.</p>
4484
4485 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
4486 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
4487 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
4488 RHEL is providing
4489 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
4490 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
4491 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
4492
4493 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
4494 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
4495 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
4496 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
4497 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
4498 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
4499 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
4500 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
4501 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
4502 established soon.</p>
4503
4504 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
4505 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
4506 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
4507 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
4508 for their packages.</p>
4509
4510       </div>
4511       <div class="tags">
4512
4513
4514         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>.
4515
4516
4517       </div>
4518     </div>
4519     <div class="padding"></div>
4520
4521     <div class="entry">
4522       <div class="title">
4523         <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>
4524       </div>
4525       <div class="date">
4526         23rd January 2011
4527       </div>
4528       <div class="body">
4529         <p>In the
4530 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
4531 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
4532 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
4533 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
4534 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
4535 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
4536 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
4537 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
4538 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
4539 one of my machines like this:</p>
4540
4541 <pre>
4542 loaded modules:
4543 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
4544 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
4545 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
4546 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
4547 10de:03ec pata_amd
4548 10de:03f6 sata_nv
4549 1022:1103 k8temp
4550 109e:036e bttv
4551 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
4552 11ab:4364 sky2
4553 </pre>
4554
4555 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
4556 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
4557
4558 <pre>
4559 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
4560     echo loaded pci modules:
4561     (
4562         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
4563         for address in * ; do
4564             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
4565                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
4566                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
4567                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
4568                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
4569                     echo "$id $module"
4570                 fi
4571             fi
4572         done
4573     )
4574     echo
4575 fi
4576 </pre>
4577
4578 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
4579 mappings:</p>
4580
4581 <pre>
4582 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
4583     echo loaded usb modules:
4584     (
4585         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
4586         for address in * ; do
4587             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
4588                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
4589                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
4590                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
4591                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
4592                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
4593                         echo "$id $module"
4594                     fi
4595                 fi
4596             fi
4597         done
4598     )
4599     echo
4600 fi
4601 </pre>
4602
4603 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
4604 well.</p>
4605
4606       </div>
4607       <div class="tags">
4608
4609
4610         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>.
4611
4612
4613       </div>
4614     </div>
4615     <div class="padding"></div>
4616
4617     <div class="entry">
4618       <div class="title">
4619         <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>
4620       </div>
4621       <div class="date">
4622         16th January 2011
4623       </div>
4624       <div class="body">
4625         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
4626 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
4627 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
4628 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
4629 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
4630 the Wikipedia article on
4631 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
4632 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
4633 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
4634 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
4635 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
4636 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
4637 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
4638 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
4639 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
4640 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
4641 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
4642 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
4643
4644 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
4645 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
4646 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
4647 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
4648 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
4649 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
4650 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
4651 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
4652 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
4653 from last week</a>.</p>
4654
4655 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
4656 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
4657 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
4658 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
4659 was without royalties and license terms, check out
4660 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
4661 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
4662
4663 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
4664 available from
4665 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
4666 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
4667 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
4668
4669 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
4670 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
4671 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
4672 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
4673
4674       </div>
4675       <div class="tags">
4676
4677
4678         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>.
4679
4680
4681       </div>
4682     </div>
4683     <div class="padding"></div>
4684
4685     <div class="entry">
4686       <div class="title">
4687         <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>
4688       </div>
4689       <div class="date">
4690         12th January 2011
4691       </div>
4692       <div class="body">
4693         <p>Today I discovered
4694 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
4695 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
4696 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
4697 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
4698 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
4699 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
4700 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
4701 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
4702 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
4703 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
4704 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
4705 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
4706 on the Google announcement is available from
4707 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
4708 A good read. :)</p>
4709
4710 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
4711 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
4712 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
4713 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
4714 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
4715 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
4716 browsers support H.264, and others support
4717 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
4718 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
4719 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
4720 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
4721 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
4722 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
4723 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
4724 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
4725
4726 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
4727 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
4728 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
4729 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
4730 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
4731 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
4732 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
4733
4734 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
4735 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
4736 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
4737 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
4738 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
4739 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
4740 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
4741
4742 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
4743 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
4744 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
4745 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
4746 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
4747 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
4748 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
4749
4750 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
4751 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
4752 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
4753 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
4754 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
4755 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
4756 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
4757 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
4758 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
4759 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
4760 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
4761 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
4762 I guess time will tell.</p>
4763
4764 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
4765 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
4766 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
4767
4768       </div>
4769       <div class="tags">
4770
4771
4772         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>.
4773
4774
4775       </div>
4776     </div>
4777     <div class="padding"></div>
4778
4779     <div class="entry">
4780       <div class="title">
4781         <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>
4782       </div>
4783       <div class="date">
4784         30th December 2010
4785       </div>
4786       <div class="body">
4787         <p>After trying to
4788 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
4789 Ogg Theora</a> to
4790 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
4791 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
4792 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
4793 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
4794 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
4795 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
4796 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
4797
4798 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
4799 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
4800 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
4801 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
4802 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
4803 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
4804 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
4805
4806 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
4807 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
4808
4809       </div>
4810       <div class="tags">
4811
4812
4813         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>.
4814
4815
4816       </div>
4817     </div>
4818     <div class="padding"></div>
4819
4820     <div class="entry">
4821       <div class="title">
4822         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
4823       </div>
4824       <div class="date">
4825         27th December 2010
4826       </div>
4827       <div class="body">
4828         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
4829 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
4830 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
4831 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
4832 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
4833 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
4834 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
4835 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
4836
4837 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
4838 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
4839 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
4840 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
4841 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
4842 page</a>.</p>
4843
4844 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
4845 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
4846 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
4847 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
4848 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
4849 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
4850 specification on equal terms.</p>
4851
4852 <blockquote>
4853
4854 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
4855 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
4856 open standard:</p>
4857
4858 <ul>
4859
4860 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
4861 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
4862 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
4863 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
4864
4865 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
4866 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
4867 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
4868 nominal fee.</li>
4869
4870 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
4871 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
4872 free basis.</li>
4873
4874 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
4875
4876 </ul>
4877 </blockquote>
4878
4879 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
4880 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
4881 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
4882 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
4883 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
4884 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
4885 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
4886
4887 <blockquote>
4888
4889 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
4890
4891 <ol>
4892
4893 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
4894 tilgængelig.</li>
4895
4896 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
4897 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
4898
4899 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
4900 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
4901
4902 </ol>
4903
4904 </blockquote>
4905
4906 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
4907 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
4908
4909 <blockquote>
4910
4911 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
4912
4913 <ol>
4914
4915 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
4916 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
4917
4918 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
4919 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
4920 Standard themselves;</li>
4921
4922 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
4923 any party or in any business model;</li>
4924
4925 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
4926 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
4927 parties;</li>
4928
4929 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
4930 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
4931 parties.</li>
4932
4933 </ol>
4934
4935 </blockquote>
4936
4937 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
4938 its
4939 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
4940 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
4941
4942 <blockquote>
4943 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
4944
4945 <ul>
4946
4947 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
4948   democratic:
4949
4950          <ul>
4951
4952          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
4953             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
4954             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
4955             and managed.</li>
4956
4957          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
4958             method, can be changed through input from all
4959             participants.</li>
4960
4961          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
4962             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
4963
4964          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
4965             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
4966
4967          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
4968             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
4969             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
4970
4971          </ul>
4972
4973 </li>
4974
4975 </ul>
4976
4977 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
4978 <ul>
4979
4980 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
4981   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
4982   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
4983   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
4984   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
4985
4986 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
4987   a technical or economic barriers</li>
4988
4989 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
4990   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
4991   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
4992   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
4993   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
4994   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
4995   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
4996   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
4997   intended to function.</li>
4998
4999 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
5000   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
5001   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
5002
5003 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
5004   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
5005   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
5006   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
5007   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
5008   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
5009   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
5010   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
5011
5012       <ul>
5013
5014       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
5015         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
5016         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
5017
5018       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
5019         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
5020         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
5021         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
5022
5023       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
5024         licensor</li>
5025
5026       </ul>
5027 </li>
5028
5029 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
5030   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
5031   or restricted licensing terms</li>
5032
5033 </ul>
5034
5035 </blockquote>
5036
5037 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
5038 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
5039 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
5040 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
5041 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
5042 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
5043 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
5044 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
5045 Standards.</p>
5046
5047       </div>
5048       <div class="tags">
5049
5050
5051         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>.
5052
5053
5054       </div>
5055     </div>
5056     <div class="padding"></div>
5057
5058     <div class="entry">
5059       <div class="title">
5060         <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>
5061       </div>
5062       <div class="date">
5063         25th December 2010
5064       </div>
5065       <div class="body">
5066         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
5067 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
5068
5069 <blockquote>
5070
5071 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
5072 as follows:</p>
5073
5074 <ol>
5075
5076 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
5077 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
5078 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
5079
5080 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
5081 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
5082 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
5083 parties.</li>
5084
5085 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
5086 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
5087 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
5088
5089 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
5090 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
5091
5092 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
5093
5094 </ol>
5095
5096 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
5097 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
5098 products based on the standard.</p>
5099 </blockquote>
5100
5101 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
5102 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
5103 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
5104 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
5105 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
5106 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
5107 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
5108 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
5109
5110 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
5111
5112 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
5113 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
5114 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
5115 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
5116 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
5117 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
5118 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
5119 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
5120 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
5121 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
5122 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
5123 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
5124 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
5125 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
5126
5127 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
5128
5129 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
5130 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
5131 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
5132 documentation indicating this.</p>
5133
5134 <p>According to
5135 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
5136 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
5137 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
5138 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
5139 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
5140 report is correct.</p>
5141
5142 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
5143
5144 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
5145 container format</a> and both the
5146 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
5147 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
5148 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
5149
5150 <blockquote>
5151
5152 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
5153 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
5154 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
5155 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
5156 specification compliance.
5157
5158 </blockquote>
5159
5160 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
5161 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
5162 this is the term:<p>
5163
5164 <blockquote>
5165
5166 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
5167 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
5168 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
5169 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
5170 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
5171 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
5172 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
5173 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
5174 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
5175 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
5176 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
5177 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
5178
5179 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
5180 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
5181 </blockquote>
5182
5183 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
5184 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
5185 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
5186 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
5187 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
5188
5189 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
5190
5191 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
5192 Theora format.
5193 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
5194 and
5195 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
5196 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
5197 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
5198 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
5199 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
5200 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
5201 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
5202 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
5203
5204 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
5205
5206 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
5207
5208 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
5209
5210 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
5211 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
5212 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
5213 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
5214 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
5215 this.</p>
5216
5217 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
5218 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
5219
5220       </div>
5221       <div class="tags">
5222
5223
5224         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>.
5225
5226
5227       </div>
5228     </div>
5229     <div class="padding"></div>
5230
5231     <div class="entry">
5232       <div class="title">
5233         <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>
5234       </div>
5235       <div class="date">
5236         25th December 2010
5237       </div>
5238       <div class="body">
5239         <p>A few days ago
5240 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
5241 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
5242 2.0 of
5243 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
5244 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
5245 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
5246 Nothing very surprising there, given
5247 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
5248 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
5249 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
5250 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
5251 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
5252 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
5253 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
5254 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
5255 standard definition from its content.</p>
5256
5257 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
5258 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
5259 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
5260 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
5261 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
5262 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
5263 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
5264 background information about that story is available in
5265 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
5266 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
5267
5268 <blockquote>
5269 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
5270 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
5271 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
5272
5273 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
5274
5275 <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>
5276
5277 <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>
5278
5279 <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>
5280
5281 <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>
5282
5283 <p>
5284 <ul>
5285 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
5286 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
5287 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
5288 </ul>
5289 </p>
5290
5291 <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>
5292
5293 <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>
5294
5295 <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>
5296
5297 <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>
5298
5299 <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>
5300
5301
5302 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
5303 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
5304 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
5305 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
5306 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
5307 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
5308
5309 </p>
5310
5311 <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>
5312
5313 <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>
5314
5315 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
5316
5317 <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>
5318
5319 <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>
5320
5321 <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>
5322
5323 <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>
5324
5325 <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>
5326
5327 <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>
5328
5329 <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>
5330
5331 <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>
5332
5333 <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>
5334
5335 <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>
5336
5337 <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>
5338
5339 <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>
5340
5341 <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>
5342
5343 <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>
5344
5345 <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>
5346
5347 <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>
5348
5349 <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>
5350
5351 <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>
5352
5353 <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>
5354
5355 <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>
5356
5357 <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>
5358
5359 <p>On security:</p>
5360
5361 <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>
5362
5363 <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>
5364
5365 <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>
5366
5367 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
5368
5369 <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>
5370
5371 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
5372
5373 <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>
5374
5375 <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>
5376
5377 <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>
5378
5379 <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>
5380
5381 <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>
5382
5383 <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>
5384
5385 <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>
5386
5387 <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>
5388
5389 <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>
5390
5391 <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>
5392
5393 <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>
5394
5395 <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>
5396
5397 <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>
5398
5399 <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>
5400
5401 <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>
5402
5403 <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>
5404
5405 <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>
5406
5407 <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>
5408
5409 <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>
5410
5411 <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>
5412
5413 <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>
5414
5415 <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>
5416
5417 <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>
5418
5419 <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>
5420
5421 <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>
5422
5423 <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>
5424
5425 <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>
5426
5427 <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>
5428
5429 <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>
5430
5431 <p>Cordially,<br>
5432 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
5433 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
5434 </blockquote>
5435
5436       </div>
5437       <div class="tags">
5438
5439
5440         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>.
5441
5442
5443       </div>
5444     </div>
5445     <div class="padding"></div>
5446
5447     <div class="entry">
5448       <div class="title">
5449         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
5450       </div>
5451       <div class="date">
5452         25th December 2010
5453       </div>
5454       <div class="body">
5455         <p>Half a year ago I
5456 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
5457 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
5458 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
5459 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
5460
5461 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
5462 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
5463 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
5464 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
5465 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
5466 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
5467 got such a great test tool available.</p>
5468
5469       </div>
5470       <div class="tags">
5471
5472
5473         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>.
5474
5475
5476       </div>
5477     </div>
5478     <div class="padding"></div>
5479
5480     <div class="entry">
5481       <div class="title">
5482         <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>
5483       </div>
5484       <div class="date">
5485         22nd December 2010
5486       </div>
5487       <div class="body">
5488         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
5489 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
5490 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
5491 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
5492 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
5493 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
5494 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
5495 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
5496 university.</p>
5497
5498 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
5499 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
5500 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
5501 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
5502 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
5503 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
5504 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
5505 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
5506
5507 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
5508 I perform on a new model.</p>
5509
5510 <ul>
5511
5512 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
5513 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
5514 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
5515
5516 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
5517 installation, X.org is working.</li>
5518
5519 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
5520 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
5521 reported by the program.</li>
5522
5523 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
5524 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
5525 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
5526 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
5527 normally test this by playing
5528 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
5529 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
5530
5531 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
5532 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
5533
5534 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
5535 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
5536
5537 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
5538 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
5539
5540 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
5541 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
5542 few.</li>
5543
5544 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
5545 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
5546 notice this.</li>
5547
5548 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
5549 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
5550 resume.</li>
5551
5552 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
5553 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
5554 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
5555 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
5556 not.</li>
5557
5558 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
5559 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
5560 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
5561 existence.</li>
5562
5563 </ul>
5564
5565 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
5566 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
5567 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
5568 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
5569 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
5570 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
5571 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
5572 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
5573
5574       </div>
5575       <div class="tags">
5576
5577
5578         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>.
5579
5580
5581       </div>
5582     </div>
5583     <div class="padding"></div>
5584
5585     <div class="entry">
5586       <div class="title">
5587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
5588       </div>
5589       <div class="date">
5590         11th December 2010
5591       </div>
5592       <div class="body">
5593         <p>As I continue to explore
5594 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
5595 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
5596 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
5597
5598 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
5599 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
5600 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
5601 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
5602 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
5603 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
5604 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
5605 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
5606 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
5607 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
5608 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
5609 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
5610 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
5611 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
5612 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
5613 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
5614 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
5615 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
5616 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
5617 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
5618
5619 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
5620 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
5621 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
5622 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
5623 If the Skolelinux foundation
5624 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
5625 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
5626 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
5627 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
5628 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
5629 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
5630 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
5631 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
5632
5633 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
5634 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
5635 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
5636 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
5637 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
5638 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
5639 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
5640 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
5641 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
5642 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
5643 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
5644 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
5645 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
5646 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
5647 currencies.</p>
5648
5649 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
5650 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
5651 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
5652 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
5653 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
5654 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
5655 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
5656 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
5657 BitCoins.  Check out
5658 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
5659 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
5660 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
5661 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
5662 yet.</p>
5663
5664 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
5665 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
5666 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
5667 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
5668 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
5669
5670       </div>
5671       <div class="tags">
5672
5673
5674         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>.
5675
5676
5677       </div>
5678     </div>
5679     <div class="padding"></div>
5680
5681     <div class="entry">
5682       <div class="title">
5683         <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>
5684       </div>
5685       <div class="date">
5686         10th December 2010
5687       </div>
5688       <div class="body">
5689         <p>With this weeks lawless
5690 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
5691 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
5692 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
5693 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
5694 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
5695 A blog post from
5696 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
5697 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
5698 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
5699 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
5700 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
5701 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
5702 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
5703
5704 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
5705 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
5706 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
5707 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
5708 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
5709 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
5710 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
5711 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
5712 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
5713 Debian</a> soon.</p>
5714
5715 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
5716 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
5717 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
5718 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
5719 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
5720 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
5721 you can even get
5722 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
5723 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
5724 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
5725 on the current exchange rates.</p>
5726
5727 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
5728 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
5729 donations to the address
5730 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
5731
5732       </div>
5733       <div class="tags">
5734
5735
5736         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>.
5737
5738
5739       </div>
5740     </div>
5741     <div class="padding"></div>
5742
5743     <div class="entry">
5744       <div class="title">
5745         <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>
5746       </div>
5747       <div class="date">
5748          9th December 2010
5749       </div>
5750       <div class="body">
5751         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
5752 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
5753 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
5754 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
5755 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
5756 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
5757 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
5758 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
5759 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
5760 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
5761 operational.</p>
5762
5763 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
5764 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
5765 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
5766 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
5767 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
5768 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
5769 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
5770
5771       </div>
5772       <div class="tags">
5773
5774
5775         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>.
5776
5777
5778       </div>
5779     </div>
5780     <div class="padding"></div>
5781
5782     <div class="entry">
5783       <div class="title">
5784         <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>
5785       </div>
5786       <div class="date">
5787         29th November 2010
5788       </div>
5789       <div class="body">
5790         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5791 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
5792 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
5793 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
5794 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
5795 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
5796
5797 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
5798 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
5799 will hold its
5800 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
5801 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
5802 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
5803 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
5804 vote this year.</p>
5805
5806       </div>
5807       <div class="tags">
5808
5809
5810         Tags: <a href="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>.
5811
5812
5813       </div>
5814     </div>
5815     <div class="padding"></div>
5816
5817     <div class="entry">
5818       <div class="title">
5819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
5820       </div>
5821       <div class="date">
5822         27th November 2010
5823       </div>
5824       <div class="body">
5825         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
5826 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
5827 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
5828 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
5829 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
5830 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
5831 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
5832 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
5833
5834 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
5835 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
5836 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
5837 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
5838 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
5839 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
5840 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
5841 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
5842 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
5843 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
5844 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
5845
5846 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
5847 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
5848 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
5849 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
5850 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
5851 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
5852 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
5853 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
5854 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
5855 what is going on.</p>
5856
5857       </div>
5858       <div class="tags">
5859
5860
5861         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>.
5862
5863
5864       </div>
5865     </div>
5866     <div class="padding"></div>
5867
5868     <div class="entry">
5869       <div class="title">
5870         <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>
5871       </div>
5872       <div class="date">
5873         22nd November 2010
5874       </div>
5875       <div class="body">
5876         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
5877 upgrade testing of the
5878 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
5879 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
5880 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
5881 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
5882
5883 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
5884
5885 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
5886
5887 <blockquote><p>
5888   apache2.2-bin
5889   aptdaemon
5890   baobab
5891   binfmt-support
5892   browser-plugin-gnash
5893   cheese-common
5894   cli-common
5895   cups-pk-helper
5896   dmz-cursor-theme
5897   empathy
5898   empathy-common
5899   freedesktop-sound-theme
5900   freeglut3
5901   gconf-defaults-service
5902   gdm-themes
5903   gedit-plugins
5904   geoclue
5905   geoclue-hostip
5906   geoclue-localnet
5907   geoclue-manual
5908   geoclue-yahoo
5909   gnash
5910   gnash-common
5911   gnome
5912   gnome-backgrounds
5913   gnome-cards-data
5914   gnome-codec-install
5915   gnome-core
5916   gnome-desktop-environment
5917   gnome-disk-utility
5918   gnome-screenshot
5919   gnome-search-tool
5920   gnome-session-canberra
5921   gnome-system-log
5922   gnome-themes-extras
5923   gnome-themes-more
5924   gnome-user-share
5925   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
5926   gstreamer0.10-tools
5927   gtk2-engines
5928   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
5929   gtk2-engines-smooth
5930   hamster-applet
5931   libapache2-mod-dnssd
5932   libapr1
5933   libaprutil1
5934   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
5935   libaprutil1-ldap
5936   libart2.0-cil
5937   libboost-date-time1.42.0
5938   libboost-python1.42.0
5939   libboost-thread1.42.0
5940   libchamplain-0.4-0
5941   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
5942   libcheese-gtk18
5943   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
5944   libcryptui0
5945   libdiscid0
5946   libelf1
5947   libepc-1.0-2
5948   libepc-common
5949   libepc-ui-1.0-2
5950   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
5951   libfreerdp0
5952   libgconf2.0-cil
5953   libgdata-common
5954   libgdata7
5955   libgdu-gtk0
5956   libgee2
5957   libgeoclue0
5958   libgexiv2-0
5959   libgif4
5960   libglade2.0-cil
5961   libglib2.0-cil
5962   libgmime2.4-cil
5963   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
5964   libgnome2.24-cil
5965   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
5966   libgpod-common
5967   libgpod4
5968   libgtk2.0-cil
5969   libgtkglext1
5970   libgtksourceview2.0-common
5971   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
5972   libmono-addins0.2-cil
5973   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
5974   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
5975   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
5976   libmono-posix2.0-cil
5977   libmono-security2.0-cil
5978   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
5979   libmono-system2.0-cil
5980   libmtp8
5981   libmusicbrainz3-6
5982   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
5983   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
5984   libopal3.6.8
5985   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
5986   libpt2.6.7
5987   libpython2.6
5988   librpm1
5989   librpmio1
5990   libsdl1.2debian
5991   libsrtp0
5992   libssh-4
5993   libtelepathy-farsight0
5994   libtelepathy-glib0
5995   libtidy-0.99-0
5996   media-player-info
5997   mesa-utils
5998   mono-2.0-gac
5999   mono-gac
6000   mono-runtime
6001   nautilus-sendto
6002   nautilus-sendto-empathy
6003   p7zip-full
6004   pkg-config
6005   python-aptdaemon
6006   python-aptdaemon-gtk
6007   python-axiom
6008   python-beautifulsoup
6009   python-bugbuddy
6010   python-clientform
6011   python-coherence
6012   python-configobj
6013   python-crypto
6014   python-cupshelpers
6015   python-elementtree
6016   python-epsilon
6017   python-evolution
6018   python-feedparser
6019   python-gdata
6020   python-gdbm
6021   python-gst0.10
6022   python-gtkglext1
6023   python-gtksourceview2
6024   python-httplib2
6025   python-louie
6026   python-mako
6027   python-markupsafe
6028   python-mechanize
6029   python-nevow
6030   python-notify
6031   python-opengl
6032   python-openssl
6033   python-pam
6034   python-pkg-resources
6035   python-pyasn1
6036   python-pysqlite2
6037   python-rdflib
6038   python-serial
6039   python-tagpy
6040   python-twisted-bin
6041   python-twisted-conch
6042   python-twisted-core
6043   python-twisted-web
6044   python-utidylib
6045   python-webkit
6046   python-xdg
6047   python-zope.interface
6048   remmina
6049   remmina-plugin-data
6050   remmina-plugin-rdp
6051   remmina-plugin-vnc
6052   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
6053   rhythmbox-plugins
6054   rpm-common
6055   rpm2cpio
6056   seahorse-plugins
6057   shotwell
6058   software-center
6059   system-config-printer-udev
6060   telepathy-gabble
6061   telepathy-mission-control-5
6062   telepathy-salut
6063   tomboy
6064   totem
6065   totem-coherence
6066   totem-mozilla
6067   totem-plugins
6068   transmission-common
6069   xdg-user-dirs
6070   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
6071   xserver-xephyr
6072 </p></blockquote>
6073
6074 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
6075
6076 <blockquote><p>
6077   cheese
6078   ekiga
6079   eog
6080   epiphany-extensions
6081   evolution-exchange
6082   fast-user-switch-applet
6083   file-roller
6084   gcalctool
6085   gconf-editor
6086   gdm
6087   gedit
6088   gedit-common
6089   gnome-games
6090   gnome-games-data
6091   gnome-nettool
6092   gnome-system-tools
6093   gnome-themes
6094   gnuchess
6095   gucharmap
6096   guile-1.8-libs
6097   libavahi-ui0
6098   libdmx1
6099   libgalago3
6100   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
6101   libgtksourceview2.0-0
6102   liblircclient0
6103   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
6104   libspeexdsp1
6105   libsvga1
6106   rhythmbox
6107   seahorse
6108   sound-juicer
6109   system-config-printer
6110   totem-common
6111   transmission-gtk
6112   vinagre
6113   vino
6114 </p></blockquote>
6115
6116 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6117
6118 <blockquote><p>
6119   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
6120 </p></blockquote>
6121
6122 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6123
6124 <blockquote><p>
6125 [nothing]
6126 </p></blockquote>
6127
6128 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
6129
6130 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
6131
6132 <blockquote><p>
6133   ksmserver
6134 </p></blockquote>
6135
6136 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
6137
6138 <blockquote><p>
6139   kwin
6140   network-manager-kde
6141 </p></blockquote>
6142
6143 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6144
6145 <blockquote><p>
6146   arts
6147   dolphin
6148   freespacenotifier
6149   google-gadgets-gst
6150   google-gadgets-xul
6151   kappfinder
6152   kcalc
6153   kcharselect
6154   kde-core
6155   kde-plasma-desktop
6156   kde-standard
6157   kde-window-manager
6158   kdeartwork
6159   kdeartwork-emoticons
6160   kdeartwork-style
6161   kdeartwork-theme-icon
6162   kdebase
6163   kdebase-apps
6164   kdebase-workspace
6165   kdebase-workspace-bin
6166   kdebase-workspace-data
6167   kdeeject
6168   kdelibs
6169   kdeplasma-addons
6170   kdeutils
6171   kdewallpapers
6172   kdf
6173   kfloppy
6174   kgpg
6175   khelpcenter4
6176   kinfocenter
6177   konq-plugins-l10n
6178   konqueror-nsplugins
6179   kscreensaver
6180   kscreensaver-xsavers
6181   ktimer
6182   kwrite
6183   libgle3
6184   libkde4-ruby1.8
6185   libkonq5
6186   libkonq5-templates
6187   libnetpbm10
6188   libplasma-ruby
6189   libplasma-ruby1.8
6190   libqt4-ruby1.8
6191   marble-data
6192   marble-plugins
6193   netpbm
6194   nuvola-icon-theme
6195   plasma-dataengines-workspace
6196   plasma-desktop
6197   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
6198   plasma-runners-addons
6199   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
6200   plasma-scriptengine-python
6201   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
6202   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
6203   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
6204   plasma-scriptengines
6205   plasma-wallpapers-addons
6206   plasma-widget-folderview
6207   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
6208   ruby
6209   sweeper
6210   update-notifier-kde
6211   xscreensaver-data-extra
6212   xscreensaver-gl
6213   xscreensaver-gl-extra
6214   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
6215 </p></blockquote>
6216
6217 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6218
6219 <blockquote><p>
6220   ark
6221   google-gadgets-common
6222   google-gadgets-qt
6223   htdig
6224   kate
6225   kdebase-bin
6226   kdebase-data
6227   kdepasswd
6228   kfind
6229   klipper
6230   konq-plugins
6231   konqueror
6232   ksysguard
6233   ksysguardd
6234   libarchive1
6235   libcln6
6236   libeet1
6237   libeina-svn-06
6238   libggadget-1.0-0b
6239   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
6240   libgps19
6241   libkdecorations4
6242   libkephal4
6243   libkonq4
6244   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
6245   libkscreensaver5
6246   libksgrd4
6247   libksignalplotter4
6248   libkunitconversion4
6249   libkwineffects1a
6250   libmarblewidget4
6251   libntrack-qt4-1
6252   libntrack0
6253   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
6254   libplasmaclock4a
6255   libplasmagenericshell4
6256   libprocesscore4a
6257   libprocessui4a
6258   libqalculate5
6259   libqedje0a
6260   libqtruby4shared2
6261   libqzion0a
6262   libruby1.8
6263   libscim8c2a
6264   libsmokekdecore4-3
6265   libsmokekdeui4-3
6266   libsmokekfile3
6267   libsmokekhtml3
6268   libsmokekio3
6269   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
6270   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
6271   libsmokekparts3
6272   libsmokektexteditor3
6273   libsmokekutils3
6274   libsmokenepomuk3
6275   libsmokephonon3
6276   libsmokeplasma3
6277   libsmokeqtcore4-3
6278   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
6279   libsmokeqtgui4-3
6280   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
6281   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
6282   libsmokeqtscript4-3
6283   libsmokeqtsql4-3
6284   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
6285   libsmokeqttest4-3
6286   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
6287   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
6288   libsmokeqtxml4-3
6289   libsmokesolid3
6290   libsmokesoprano3
6291   libtaskmanager4a
6292   libtidy-0.99-0
6293   libweather-ion4a
6294   libxklavier16
6295   libxxf86misc1
6296   okteta
6297   oxygencursors
6298   plasma-dataengines-addons
6299   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
6300   plasma-widget-lancelot
6301   plasma-widgets-addons
6302   plasma-widgets-workspace
6303   polkit-kde-1
6304   ruby1.8
6305   systemsettings
6306   update-notifier-common
6307 </p></blockquote>
6308
6309 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
6310 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
6311 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
6312 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
6313
6314       </div>
6315       <div class="tags">
6316
6317
6318         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>.
6319
6320
6321       </div>
6322     </div>
6323     <div class="padding"></div>
6324
6325     <div class="entry">
6326       <div class="title">
6327         <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>
6328       </div>
6329       <div class="date">
6330         22nd November 2010
6331       </div>
6332       <div class="body">
6333         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
6334 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
6335 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
6336 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
6337 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
6338 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
6339 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
6340 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
6341 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
6342
6343 <p>I found
6344 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
6345 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
6346 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
6347 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
6348 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
6349 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
6350
6351 <pre>
6352 #!/bin/sh
6353
6354 # Based on
6355 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
6356
6357 set -e
6358 set -x
6359
6360 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
6361     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
6362     exit 1
6363 else
6364     host="$1"
6365 fi
6366
6367 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
6368     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
6369     exit 1
6370 fi
6371
6372 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
6373 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
6374 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
6375 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
6376
6377 img=$host.img
6378 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
6379 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
6380
6381 parted $img mklabel msdos
6382 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
6383 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
6384 parted $img set 1 boot on
6385
6386 modprobe dm-mod
6387 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
6388 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
6389
6390 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
6391 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
6392 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
6393
6394 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
6395 losetup -d /dev/loop0
6396 </pre>
6397
6398 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
6399 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
6400
6401 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
6402 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
6403 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
6404 seem to work just fine.</p>
6405
6406       </div>
6407       <div class="tags">
6408
6409
6410         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>.
6411
6412
6413       </div>
6414     </div>
6415     <div class="padding"></div>
6416
6417     <div class="entry">
6418       <div class="title">
6419         <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>
6420       </div>
6421       <div class="date">
6422         20th November 2010
6423       </div>
6424       <div class="body">
6425         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
6426 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
6427 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
6428 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
6429
6430 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
6431 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
6432 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
6433
6434 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
6435
6436 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
6437
6438 <blockquote><p>
6439   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
6440   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
6441   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
6442   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
6443   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
6444   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
6445   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
6446   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
6447   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
6448   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
6449   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
6450   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
6451   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
6452   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
6453   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
6454   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
6455   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
6456   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
6457   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
6458   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
6459   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
6460   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
6461   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
6462   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
6463   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
6464   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
6465   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
6466   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
6467   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
6468   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
6469   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
6470   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
6471   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
6472   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
6473   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
6474   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
6475   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
6476   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
6477   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
6478   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
6479   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
6480   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
6481   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
6482   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
6483   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
6484   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
6485   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
6486   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
6487   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
6488   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
6489   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
6490   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
6491   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
6492   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
6493   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
6494   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
6495   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
6496   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
6497   zip
6498 </p></blockquote>
6499
6500 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
6501
6502 <blockquote><p>
6503   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
6504   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
6505   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
6506   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
6507   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
6508   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
6509   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
6510   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
6511   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
6512   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
6513   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
6514   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
6515   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
6516   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
6517   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
6518   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
6519   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
6520   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
6521   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
6522   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
6523   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
6524   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
6525   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
6526   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
6527   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
6528   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
6529   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
6530   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
6531   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
6532 </p></blockquote>
6533
6534 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6535
6536 <blockquote><p>
6537   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
6538 </p></blockquote>
6539
6540 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6541
6542 <blockquote><p>
6543 [nothing]
6544 </p></blockquote>
6545
6546 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
6547
6548 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
6549
6550 <blockquote><p>
6551   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
6552   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
6553   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
6554   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
6555   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
6556   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
6557   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
6558   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
6559   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
6560   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
6561   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
6562   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
6563   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
6564   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
6565   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
6566   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
6567   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
6568   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
6569   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
6570   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
6571   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
6572   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
6573   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
6574   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
6575   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
6576   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
6577   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
6578   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
6579   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
6580   ttf-sazanami-gothic
6581 </p></blockquote>
6582
6583 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
6584
6585 <blockquote><p>
6586   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
6587   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
6588   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
6589   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
6590   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
6591   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
6592   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
6593   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
6594   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
6595   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
6596   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
6597   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
6598   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
6599   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
6600   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
6601   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
6602   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
6603   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
6604   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
6605   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
6606   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
6607   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
6608   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
6609   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
6610   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
6611   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
6612   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
6613   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
6614   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
6615   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
6616   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
6617   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
6618   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
6619 </p></blockquote>
6620
6621 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6622
6623 <blockquote><p>
6624   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
6625   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
6626   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
6627   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
6628   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
6629   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
6630   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
6631 </p></blockquote>
6632
6633 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6634
6635 <blockquote><p>
6636   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
6637 </p></blockquote>
6638
6639       </div>
6640       <div class="tags">
6641
6642
6643         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>.
6644
6645
6646       </div>
6647     </div>
6648     <div class="padding"></div>
6649
6650     <div class="entry">
6651       <div class="title">
6652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
6653       </div>
6654       <div class="date">
6655         20th November 2010
6656       </div>
6657       <div class="body">
6658         <p>Answering
6659 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
6660 call from the Gnash project</a> for
6661 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
6662 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
6663 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
6664 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
6665 releases out more often.</p>
6666
6667 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
6668 I have considered setting up a <a
6669 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
6670 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
6671 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
6672 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
6673 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
6674 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
6675 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
6676 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
6677 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
6678 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
6679 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
6680 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
6681
6682       </div>
6683       <div class="tags">
6684
6685
6686         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>.
6687
6688
6689       </div>
6690     </div>
6691     <div class="padding"></div>
6692
6693     <div class="entry">
6694       <div class="title">
6695         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
6696       </div>
6697       <div class="date">
6698          9th November 2010
6699       </div>
6700       <div class="body">
6701         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
6702
6703 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
6704 3D linked in from
6705 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
6706 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
6707
6708       </div>
6709       <div class="tags">
6710
6711
6712         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>.
6713
6714
6715       </div>
6716     </div>
6717     <div class="padding"></div>
6718
6719     <div class="entry">
6720       <div class="title">
6721         <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>
6722       </div>
6723       <div class="date">
6724          7th November 2010
6725       </div>
6726       <div class="body">
6727         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
6728 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
6729 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
6730 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
6731 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
6732 working using this DVD.</p>
6733
6734 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
6735 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
6736 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
6737 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
6738 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
6739 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
6740 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
6741
6742 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
6743 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
6744 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
6745 Debian archive.</p>
6746
6747 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
6748 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
6749 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
6750 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
6751 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
6752 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
6753 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
6754 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
6755 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
6756 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
6757 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
6758 free X driver should work.</p>
6759
6760 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
6761 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
6762 DVD more useful again.</p>
6763
6764       </div>
6765       <div class="tags">
6766
6767
6768         Tags: <a href="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>.
6769
6770
6771       </div>
6772     </div>
6773     <div class="padding"></div>
6774
6775     <div class="entry">
6776       <div class="title">
6777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
6778       </div>
6779       <div class="date">
6780         24th October 2010
6781       </div>
6782       <div class="body">
6783         <p>Some updates.</p>
6784
6785 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
6786 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
6787 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
6788 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
6789 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
6790 :)</p>
6791
6792 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
6793 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
6794 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
6795 It is called
6796 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
6797 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
6798 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
6799 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
6800 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
6801 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
6802
6803 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
6804 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
6805 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
6806 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
6807 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
6808 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
6809 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
6810 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
6811 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
6812 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
6813
6814       </div>
6815       <div class="tags">
6816
6817
6818         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>.
6819
6820
6821       </div>
6822     </div>
6823     <div class="padding"></div>
6824
6825     <div class="entry">
6826       <div class="title">
6827         <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>
6828       </div>
6829       <div class="date">
6830         19th October 2010
6831       </div>
6832       <div class="body">
6833         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
6834 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
6835 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
6836 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
6837 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
6838 AVM2 flash files.</p>
6839
6840 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
6841 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
6842 following text:</P>
6843
6844 <p><blockquote>
6845
6846   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
6847   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
6848
6849   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
6850
6851   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
6852
6853   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
6854   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
6855   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
6856   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
6857   days. The project web page is available from
6858   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
6859   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
6860   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
6861
6862   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
6863   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
6864   to get this to happen.</p>
6865
6866   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
6867   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
6868
6869 </blockquote></p>
6870
6871 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
6872 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
6873 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
6874 :)</p>
6875
6876       </div>
6877       <div class="tags">
6878
6879
6880         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>.
6881
6882
6883       </div>
6884     </div>
6885     <div class="padding"></div>
6886
6887     <div class="entry">
6888       <div class="title">
6889         <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>
6890       </div>
6891       <div class="date">
6892          9th October 2010
6893       </div>
6894       <div class="body">
6895         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
6896 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
6897 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
6898 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
6899 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
6900 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
6901 robots.</p>
6902
6903 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
6904 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
6905 a few less important features too.</p>
6906
6907 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
6908 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
6909 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
6910 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
6911
6912 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
6913 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
6914 source or binary package:</p>
6915
6916 <p><ul>
6917 <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>
6918 <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>
6919 <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>
6920 </ul></p>
6921
6922 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
6923 please let me know.</p>
6924
6925       </div>
6926       <div class="tags">
6927
6928
6929         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>.
6930
6931
6932       </div>
6933     </div>
6934     <div class="padding"></div>
6935
6936     <div class="entry">
6937       <div class="title">
6938         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
6939       </div>
6940       <div class="date">
6941          3rd October 2010
6942       </div>
6943       <div class="body">
6944         <p><ul>
6945
6946 <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
6947 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
6948
6949 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
6950 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
6951 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
6952
6953 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
6954 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
6955 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
6956 simple setup.
6957
6958 </ul></p>
6959
6960       </div>
6961       <div class="tags">
6962
6963
6964         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>.
6965
6966
6967       </div>
6968     </div>
6969     <div class="padding"></div>
6970
6971     <div class="entry">
6972       <div class="title">
6973         <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>
6974       </div>
6975       <div class="date">
6976          9th September 2010
6977       </div>
6978       <div class="body">
6979         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
6980 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
6981 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
6982 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
6983 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
6984 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
6985 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
6986 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
6987 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
6988
6989 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
6990 written:</p>
6991
6992 <blockquote>
6993 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
6994 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
6995 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
6996 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
6997 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
6998
6999 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
7000 standard.</p>
7001 </blockquote>
7002
7003 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
7004 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
7005 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
7006 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
7007
7008 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
7009 read
7010 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
7011 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
7012 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
7013 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
7014 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
7015 the issue.  The solution is to support the
7016 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
7017 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
7018 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
7019
7020       </div>
7021       <div class="tags">
7022
7023
7024         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>.
7025
7026
7027       </div>
7028     </div>
7029     <div class="padding"></div>
7030
7031     <div class="entry">
7032       <div class="title">
7033         <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>
7034       </div>
7035       <div class="date">
7036          4th September 2010
7037       </div>
7038       <div class="body">
7039         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
7040 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
7041 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
7042 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
7043 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
7044 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
7045 installed.</p>
7046
7047 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
7048 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
7049 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
7050 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
7051 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
7052 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
7053 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
7054 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
7055 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
7056
7057 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
7058 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
7059 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
7060 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
7061 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
7062 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
7063 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
7064 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
7065 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
7066 pages they want to visit.</p>
7067
7068 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
7069 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
7070 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
7071 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
7072 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
7073 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
7074 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
7075 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
7076 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
7077 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
7078 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
7079
7080       </div>
7081       <div class="tags">
7082
7083
7084         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>.
7085
7086
7087       </div>
7088     </div>
7089     <div class="padding"></div>
7090
7091     <div class="entry">
7092       <div class="title">
7093         <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>
7094       </div>
7095       <div class="date">
7096          1st September 2010
7097       </div>
7098       <div class="body">
7099         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
7100 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
7101 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
7102 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
7103 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
7104 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
7105 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
7106 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
7107 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
7108 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
7109 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
7110 drive around.</p>
7111
7112 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
7113 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
7114
7115 <p><pre>
7116 use Spykee;
7117 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
7118 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
7119 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
7120 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
7121 $spykee->left();
7122 sleep 2;
7123 $spykee->right();
7124 sleep 2;
7125 $spykee->forward();
7126 sleep 2;
7127 $spykee->back();
7128 sleep 2;
7129 $spykee->stop();
7130 </pre></p>
7131
7132 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
7133 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
7134 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
7135 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
7136 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
7137 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
7138 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
7139 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
7140 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
7141 going. :).</p>
7142
7143 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
7144 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
7145 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
7146 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
7147
7148       </div>
7149       <div class="tags">
7150
7151
7152         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>.
7153
7154
7155       </div>
7156     </div>
7157     <div class="padding"></div>
7158
7159     <div class="entry">
7160       <div class="title">
7161         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
7162       </div>
7163       <div class="date">
7164         30th August 2010
7165       </div>
7166       <div class="body">
7167         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
7168 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
7169 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
7170 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
7171 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
7172 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
7173 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
7174
7175 <pre>
7176 % ln foo bar
7177 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
7178 %
7179 </pre>
7180
7181 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
7182 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
7183 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
7184 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
7185 nevertheless. :)</p>
7186
7187 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
7188 git from
7189 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
7190
7191       </div>
7192       <div class="tags">
7193
7194
7195         Tags: <a href="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>.
7196
7197
7198       </div>
7199     </div>
7200     <div class="padding"></div>
7201
7202     <div class="entry">
7203       <div class="title">
7204         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
7205       </div>
7206       <div class="date">
7207         26th August 2010
7208       </div>
7209       <div class="body">
7210         <p>My file system sematics program
7211 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
7212 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
7213 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
7214 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
7215 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
7216 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
7217 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
7218 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
7219 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
7220 script:</p>
7221
7222 <pre>
7223 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
7224   mode_t retval = 0;
7225   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
7226   if (-1 != fd) {
7227     unlink(name);
7228     struct stat statbuf;
7229     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
7230       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
7231     }
7232     close(fd);
7233   }
7234   return retval;
7235 }
7236
7237 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
7238 int test_umask(void) {
7239   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
7240
7241   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
7242   mode_t newmode;
7243   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
7244     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
7245            newmode);
7246   }
7247   umask(007);
7248   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
7249     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
7250            newmode);
7251   }
7252
7253   umask (orig_umask);
7254   return 0;
7255 }
7256
7257 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
7258   [...]
7259   test_umask();
7260   return 0;
7261 }
7262 </pre>
7263
7264 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
7265
7266 <pre>
7267 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
7268 info: testing symlink creation
7269 info: testing subdirectory creation
7270 info: testing fcntl locking
7271   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
7272   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
7273   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
7274   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
7275   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
7276   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
7277 info: testing umask effect on file creation
7278 </pre>
7279
7280 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
7281 result:</p>
7282
7283 <pre>
7284 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
7285 info: testing symlink creation
7286 info: testing subdirectory creation
7287 info: testing fcntl locking
7288   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
7289   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
7290   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
7291   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
7292   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
7293   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
7294 info: testing umask effect on file creation
7295   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
7296   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
7297 </pre>
7298
7299 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
7300 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
7301 directory.</p>
7302
7303 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
7304 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
7305
7306 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
7307 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
7308 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
7309
7310       </div>
7311       <div class="tags">
7312
7313
7314         Tags: <a href="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>.
7315
7316
7317       </div>
7318     </div>
7319     <div class="padding"></div>
7320
7321     <div class="entry">
7322       <div class="title">
7323         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
7324       </div>
7325       <div class="date">
7326         15th August 2010
7327       </div>
7328       <div class="body">
7329         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
7330 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
7331 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
7332 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
7333 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
7334 long time.</p>
7335
7336       </div>
7337       <div class="tags">
7338
7339
7340         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>.
7341
7342
7343       </div>
7344     </div>
7345     <div class="padding"></div>
7346
7347     <div class="entry">
7348       <div class="title">
7349         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
7350       </div>
7351       <div class="date">
7352          9th August 2010
7353       </div>
7354       <div class="body">
7355         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
7356 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
7357 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
7358 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
7359 generated configuration.</p>
7360
7361 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
7362 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
7363 without any manual configuration.</p>
7364
7365 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
7366 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
7367 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
7368 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
7369 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
7370 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
7371 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
7372 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
7373 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
7374 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
7375 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
7376 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
7377 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
7378 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
7379 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
7380 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
7381 use.</p>
7382
7383 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
7384 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
7385 working properly out of the box:</p>
7386
7387 <ul>
7388 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
7389 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
7390 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
7391 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
7392 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
7393 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
7394 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
7395 </ul>
7396
7397 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
7398
7399 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
7400 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
7401 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
7402 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
7403 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
7404
7405 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
7406 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
7407 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
7408 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
7409 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
7410 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
7411 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
7412 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
7413
7414 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
7415 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
7416 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
7417 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
7418 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
7419 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
7420 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
7421 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
7422 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
7423 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
7424 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
7425 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
7426 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
7427 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
7428 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
7429 current DNS domain is used.</p>
7430
7431 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
7432 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
7433 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
7434 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
7435 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
7436 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
7437 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
7438 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
7439 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
7440 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
7441 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
7442 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
7443 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
7444
7445 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
7446 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
7447 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
7448 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
7449 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
7450 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
7451 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
7452 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
7453 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
7454 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
7455 do for now. :)</p>
7456
7457 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
7458 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
7459 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
7460 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
7461 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
7462 yet.</p>
7463
7464 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
7465 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
7466
7467 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
7468 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
7469 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
7470 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
7471
7472       </div>
7473       <div class="tags">
7474
7475
7476         Tags: <a href="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>.
7477
7478
7479       </div>
7480     </div>
7481     <div class="padding"></div>
7482
7483     <div class="entry">
7484       <div class="title">
7485         <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>
7486       </div>
7487       <div class="date">
7488          8th August 2010
7489       </div>
7490       <div class="body">
7491         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
7492 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
7493 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
7494 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
7495 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
7496 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
7497 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
7498
7499 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
7500 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
7501 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
7502 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
7503 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
7504 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
7505 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
7506
7507 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
7508 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
7509 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
7510 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
7511 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
7512
7513 <pre>
7514 /*
7515  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
7516  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
7517  * directory.
7518  * License: GPL v2 or later
7519  *
7520  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
7521  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
7522 */
7523
7524 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
7525 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
7526 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
7527
7528 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
7529
7530 #include &lt;errno.h>
7531 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
7532 #include &lt;stdio.h>
7533 #include &lt;string.h>
7534 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
7535 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
7536 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
7537 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
7538 #include &lt;unistd.h>
7539
7540 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
7541 /*
7542  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
7543  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
7544  * below.
7545  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
7546  */
7547 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
7548 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
7549   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
7550 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
7551   char *zErrMsg;
7552   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
7553   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
7554   unlink(name);
7555   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
7556   if( rc ){
7557     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
7558     sqlite3_close(db);
7559     return -1;
7560   }
7561
7562   /* create tables */
7563   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
7564   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
7565     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
7566     sqlite3_close(db);
7567     return -1;
7568   }
7569   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
7570   sqlite3_close(db);
7571   return 0;
7572 }
7573 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
7574
7575 /*
7576  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
7577  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
7578  * done in the sqlite3 library.
7579  * See also
7580  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
7581  * POSIX specification
7582  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
7583  */
7584 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
7585   struct flock fl;
7586   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
7587   unlink(name);
7588   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
7589   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
7590
7591   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
7592   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
7593   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
7594   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
7595   fl.l_len    = 1;
7596   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
7597   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
7598
7599   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
7600   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
7601   fl.l_len    = 510;
7602   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
7603   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
7604
7605   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
7606   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
7607   fl.l_len    = 1;
7608   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
7609   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
7610
7611   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
7612   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
7613   fl.l_len    = 1;
7614   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
7615   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
7616
7617   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
7618   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
7619   fl.l_len    = 510;
7620   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
7621
7622   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
7623   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
7624   fl.l_len    = 2;
7625   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
7626   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
7627
7628   close(fd);
7629   return 0;
7630 }
7631
7632 /*
7633  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
7634  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
7635  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
7636  * slowing down file operations.
7637  */
7638 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
7639 #define LEVELS 5
7640   char *path = strdup("test");
7641   char *dirs[LEVELS];
7642   int level;
7643   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
7644   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
7645     char *newpath = NULL;
7646     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
7647       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
7648              path, strerror(errno));
7649       break;
7650     }
7651     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
7652     free(path);
7653     path = newpath;
7654   }
7655   return 0;
7656 }
7657
7658 /*
7659  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
7660  * KDE.
7661  */
7662 int test_symlinks(void) {
7663   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
7664   unlink("symlink");
7665   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
7666     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
7667   return 0;
7668 }
7669
7670 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
7671   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
7672   test_symlinks();
7673   test_subdirectory_creation();
7674 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
7675   test_sqlite_open();
7676 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
7677   test_gcompris_locking();
7678   return 0;
7679 }
7680 </pre>
7681
7682 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
7683 this:</p>
7684
7685 <pre>
7686 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
7687 info: testing symlink creation
7688 info: testing subdirectory creation
7689 info: sqlite worked
7690 info: testing fcntl locking
7691   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
7692   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
7693   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
7694   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
7695   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
7696   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
7697 </pre>
7698
7699 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
7700 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
7701 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
7702 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
7703 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
7704 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
7705 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
7706 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
7707
7708 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
7709 it. :)</p>
7710
7711 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
7712 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
7713 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</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/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html">Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</a>
7729       </div>
7730       <div class="date">
7731          7th August 2010
7732       </div>
7733       <div class="body">
7734         <p>A few days ago, I
7735 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
7736 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
7737 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
7738 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
7739 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
7740 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
7741 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
7742 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
7743 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
7744
7745 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
7746 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
7747 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
7748 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
7749 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
7750 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
7751 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
7752 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
7753 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
7754 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
7755 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
7756 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
7757 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
7758 gave it a IP address.</p>
7759
7760 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
7761 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
7762 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
7763 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
7764 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
7765 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
7766 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
7767 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
7768
7769 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
7770 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
7771 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
7772 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
7773 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
7774 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
7775
7776 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
7777 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
7778 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
7779 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
7780 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
7781 with UID and GID values.</p>
7782
7783 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
7784 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
7785
7786       </div>
7787       <div class="tags">
7788
7789
7790         Tags: <a href="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>.
7791
7792
7793       </div>
7794     </div>
7795     <div class="padding"></div>
7796
7797     <div class="entry">
7798       <div class="title">
7799         <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>
7800       </div>
7801       <div class="date">
7802          3rd August 2010
7803       </div>
7804       <div class="body">
7805         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
7806 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
7807 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
7808 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
7809 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
7810 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
7811 servers.</p>
7812
7813 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
7814 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
7815 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
7816 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
7817 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
7818 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
7819 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
7820 .uio.no.</p>
7821
7822 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
7823 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
7824 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
7825 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
7826 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
7827 university servers.</p>
7828
7829 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
7830 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
7831 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
7832 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
7833 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
7834 uses.</p>
7835
7836       </div>
7837       <div class="tags">
7838
7839
7840         Tags: <a href="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>.
7841
7842
7843       </div>
7844     </div>
7845     <div class="padding"></div>
7846
7847     <div class="entry">
7848       <div class="title">
7849         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
7850       </div>
7851       <div class="date">
7852         27th July 2010
7853       </div>
7854       <div class="body">
7855         <p>I discovered this while doing
7856 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
7857 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
7858 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
7859 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
7860 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
7861
7862 <p>An example is from todays
7863 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
7864 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
7865 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
7866 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
7867 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
7868 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
7869 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
7870
7871 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
7872
7873 <blockquote><pre>
7874 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
7875  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
7876   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
7877 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
7878  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
7879 </pre></blockquote>
7880
7881 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
7882 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
7883 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
7884 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
7885 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
7886 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
7887 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
7888 of dependency loops.</p>
7889
7890 <p>Thanks to
7891 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
7892 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
7893 dependencies
7894 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
7895 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
7896
7897 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
7898 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
7899 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
7900 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
7901 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
7902 it.</p>
7903
7904       </div>
7905       <div class="tags">
7906
7907
7908         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>.
7909
7910
7911       </div>
7912     </div>
7913     <div class="padding"></div>
7914
7915     <div class="entry">
7916       <div class="title">
7917         <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>
7918       </div>
7919       <div class="date">
7920         27th July 2010
7921       </div>
7922       <div class="body">
7923         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
7924 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
7925 completed.</p>
7926
7927 <blockquote>
7928 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
7929 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
7930 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
7931 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
7932 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
7933 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
7934 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
7935 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
7936
7937 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
7938 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
7939 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
7940
7941 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
7942 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
7943 much.</p>
7944
7945 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
7946
7947 <ul>
7948 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
7949 <ul>
7950   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
7951          combination with some new artwork
7952   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
7953   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
7954   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
7955   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
7956   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
7957   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
7958   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
7959   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
7960   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
7961 </ul></li>
7962 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
7963     Enabled for:
7964 <ul>
7965   <li>PAM
7966   <li>LDAP
7967   <li>IMAP
7968   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
7969 </ul>
7970 </li>
7971 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
7972 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
7973     fetched from LDAP.</li>
7974 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
7975 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
7976 </ul>
7977 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
7978
7979 <ul>
7980 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
7981     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
7982     for testing.</li>
7983 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
7984     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
7985     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
7986 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
7987 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
7988 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
7989 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
7990     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
7991 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
7992     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
7993     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
7994 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
7995     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
7996     and help out with translations.</li>
7997 </ul>
7998
7999 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
8000
8001 <ul>
8002 <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>
8003 <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>
8004 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
8005 </ul>
8006 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
8007
8008 <ul>
8009 <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>
8010 <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>
8011 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
8012 </ul>
8013
8014 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
8015 get closer to the final release.</p>
8016
8017 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
8018
8019 <ul>
8020 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
8021 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
8022 </ul>
8023
8024 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
8025 <ul>
8026 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
8027 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
8028 </ul>
8029 <p>How to report bugs:
8030 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
8031
8032 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
8033 </blockquote>
8034
8035       </div>
8036       <div class="tags">
8037
8038
8039         Tags: <a href="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>.
8040
8041
8042       </div>
8043     </div>
8044     <div class="padding"></div>
8045
8046     <div class="entry">
8047       <div class="title">
8048         <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>
8049       </div>
8050       <div class="date">
8051         25th July 2010
8052       </div>
8053       <div class="body">
8054         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
8055 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
8056 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
8057 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
8058 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
8059
8060 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
8061 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
8062 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
8063 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
8064 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
8065 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
8066 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
8067
8068 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
8069 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
8070 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
8071 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
8072 up. :)</p>
8073
8074 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
8075 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
8076 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
8077
8078 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
8079 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
8080 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
8081 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
8082 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
8083 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
8084 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
8085 release another day.</p>
8086
8087 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
8088 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
8089
8090       </div>
8091       <div class="tags">
8092
8093
8094         Tags: <a href="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>.
8095
8096
8097       </div>
8098     </div>
8099     <div class="padding"></div>
8100
8101     <div class="entry">
8102       <div class="title">
8103         <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>
8104       </div>
8105       <div class="date">
8106         18th July 2010
8107       </div>
8108       <div class="body">
8109         <p>Thanks to
8110 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
8111 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
8112 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
8113 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
8114 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
8115 only available from the development server, until more experience is
8116 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
8117
8118 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
8119 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
8120 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
8121 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
8122 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
8123 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
8124 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
8125
8126       </div>
8127       <div class="tags">
8128
8129
8130         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>.
8131
8132
8133       </div>
8134     </div>
8135     <div class="padding"></div>
8136
8137     <div class="entry">
8138       <div class="title">
8139         <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>
8140       </div>
8141       <div class="date">
8142         17th July 2010
8143       </div>
8144       <div class="body">
8145         <p>This is a
8146 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
8147 on my
8148 <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
8149 work</a> on
8150 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
8151 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
8152
8153 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
8154 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
8155 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
8156 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
8157
8158 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
8159 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
8160 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
8161
8162 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
8163
8164 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
8165 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
8166 the web.
8167
8168 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
8169 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
8170 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
8171 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
8172 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
8173 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
8174
8175 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
8176 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
8177 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
8178 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
8179 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
8180 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
8181 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
8182 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
8183 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
8184 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
8185 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
8186 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
8187 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
8188 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
8189 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
8190 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
8191
8192 <blockquote><pre>
8193 ldapsearch -h ldap \
8194   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
8195   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
8196   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
8197   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
8198   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
8199   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
8200
8201 ldapsearch -h ldap \
8202   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
8203   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
8204   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
8205   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
8206   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
8207 </pre></blockquote>
8208
8209 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
8210 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
8211 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
8212 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8213 also exist.</p>
8214
8215 <blockquote><pre>
8216 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8217 objectclass: top
8218 objectclass: dnsdomain
8219 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8220 dc: tjener
8221 arecord: 10.0.2.2
8222 associateddomain: tjener.intern
8223
8224 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8225 objectclass: top
8226 objectclass: dnsdomain2
8227 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8228 dc: 2
8229 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
8230 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
8231 </pre></blockquote>
8232
8233 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
8234 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
8235 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
8236 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
8237 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
8238 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
8239 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
8240 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
8241 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
8242 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
8243 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
8244 instead.</p>
8245
8246 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
8247 like this:</p>
8248
8249 <blockquote><pre>
8250 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
8251   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
8252   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
8253   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
8254   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
8255   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
8256
8257 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
8258   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
8259 </pre></blockquote>
8260
8261 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
8262 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
8263 reverse lookups.</p>
8264
8265 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
8266 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
8267 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
8268 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
8269
8270 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
8271 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
8272 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
8273
8274 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
8275 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
8276 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
8277 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
8278 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
8279
8280 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
8281 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
8282 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
8283 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
8284 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
8285
8286 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
8287 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
8288 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
8289 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
8290 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
8291 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
8292
8293 <blockquote><pre>
8294 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
8295     SUP top
8296     AUXILIARY
8297     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
8298           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
8299           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
8300           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
8301           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
8302     ))
8303 </pre></blockquote>
8304
8305 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
8306 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
8307 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
8308 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
8309 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
8310 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
8311
8312 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
8313
8314 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
8315 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
8316 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
8317 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
8318 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
8319
8320 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
8321 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
8322 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
8323 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
8324
8325 <blockquote><pre>
8326 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
8327 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
8328 </pre></blockquote>
8329
8330 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
8331 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
8332 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
8333 search result is this entry:</p>
8334
8335 <blockquote><pre>
8336 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8337 cn: dhcp
8338 objectClass: top
8339 objectClass: dhcpServer
8340 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8341 </pre></blockquote>
8342
8343 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
8344 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
8345 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
8346 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
8347 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
8348 The search result is this entry:</p>
8349
8350 <blockquote><pre>
8351 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8352 cn: DHCP Config
8353 objectClass: top
8354 objectClass: dhcpService
8355 objectClass: dhcpOptions
8356 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8357 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
8358 dhcpStatements: authoritative
8359 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
8360 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
8361 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
8362 </pre></blockquote>
8363
8364 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
8365 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
8366 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
8367 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
8368 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
8369 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
8370 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
8371 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
8372 related computer objects.</p>
8373
8374 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
8375 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
8376 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
8377 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
8378 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
8379 like:</p>
8380
8381 <blockquote><pre>
8382 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8383 cn: hostname
8384 objectClass: top
8385 objectClass: dhcpHost
8386 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
8387 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
8388 </pre></blockquote>
8389
8390 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
8391 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
8392 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
8393 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
8394 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
8395 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
8396 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
8397 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
8398 structural object class.
8399
8400 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
8401
8402 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
8403 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
8404 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
8405 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
8406 in the configuration.</p>
8407
8408 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
8409 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
8410 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
8411 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
8412 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
8413 structure.</p>
8414
8415 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
8416 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
8417
8418 <blockquote><pre>
8419 ou=services
8420   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
8421     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
8422     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
8423       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
8424         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
8425     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
8426       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
8427         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
8428     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
8429       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
8430 </pre></blockquote>
8431
8432 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
8433 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
8434 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
8435 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
8436
8437 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
8438 like this:</p>
8439
8440 <blockquote><pre>
8441 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8442 dc: hostname
8443 objectClass: top
8444 objectClass: dhcpHost
8445 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8446 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
8447 associateddomain: hostname.intern
8448 arecord: 10.11.12.13
8449 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
8450 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
8451 </pre></blockquote>
8452
8453 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
8454 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
8455 auxiliary object class.</p>
8456
8457       </div>
8458       <div class="tags">
8459
8460
8461         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>.
8462
8463
8464       </div>
8465     </div>
8466     <div class="padding"></div>
8467
8468     <div class="entry">
8469       <div class="title">
8470         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
8471       </div>
8472       <div class="date">
8473         14th July 2010
8474       </div>
8475       <div class="body">
8476         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
8477 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
8478 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
8479 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
8480 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
8481
8482 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
8483 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
8484
8485 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
8486 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
8487 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
8488 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
8489 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
8490 to a slave DNS server.</p>
8491
8492 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
8493 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
8494 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
8495 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
8496 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
8497 seem to work.</p>
8498
8499 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
8500 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
8501 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
8502 this:</p>
8503
8504 <blockquote><pre>
8505   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8506   cn: hostname
8507   objectClass: dhcphost
8508   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8509   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
8510   associateddomain: hostname.intern
8511   arecord: 10.11.12.13
8512   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
8513   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
8514   ldapconfigsound: Y
8515 </pre></blockquote>
8516
8517 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
8518 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
8519 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
8520 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
8521
8522 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
8523 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
8524 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
8525 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
8526 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
8527 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
8528 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
8529 might be a good place to put it.</p>
8530
8531 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
8532 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
8533
8534       </div>
8535       <div class="tags">
8536
8537
8538         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>.
8539
8540
8541       </div>
8542     </div>
8543     <div class="padding"></div>
8544
8545     <div class="entry">
8546       <div class="title">
8547         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
8548       </div>
8549       <div class="date">
8550         11th July 2010
8551       </div>
8552       <div class="body">
8553         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
8554 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
8555 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
8556 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
8557
8558 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
8559 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
8560 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
8561 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
8562 LTSP clients.</p>
8563
8564 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
8565 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
8566 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
8567
8568 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
8569 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
8570 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
8571
8572 <blockquote><pre>
8573 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
8574 #
8575 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
8576 #
8577 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
8578 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
8579 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
8580 #
8581 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
8582 # existence of attribute names.
8583 #
8584 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
8585 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
8586 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
8587 #
8588 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
8589 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
8590 #
8591 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
8592 #     SUP top
8593 #     AUXILIARY
8594 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
8595
8596 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
8597 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
8598     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
8599     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
8600         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
8601         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
8602             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
8603             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
8604             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
8605             # bass value on to clients
8606             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
8607         done
8608     done
8609 fi
8610 </pre></blockquote>
8611
8612 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
8613 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
8614 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
8615 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
8616 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
8617
8618 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
8619 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
8620
8621 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
8622 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
8623 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
8624 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
8625 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
8626 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
8627
8628       </div>
8629       <div class="tags">
8630
8631
8632         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>.
8633
8634
8635       </div>
8636     </div>
8637     <div class="padding"></div>
8638
8639     <div class="entry">
8640       <div class="title">
8641         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
8642       </div>
8643       <div class="date">
8644          9th July 2010
8645       </div>
8646       <div class="body">
8647         <p>Since
8648 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
8649 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
8650 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
8651 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
8652 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
8653 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
8654 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
8655 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
8656 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
8657 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
8658 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
8659 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
8660 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
8661
8662       </div>
8663       <div class="tags">
8664
8665
8666         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>.
8667
8668
8669       </div>
8670     </div>
8671     <div class="padding"></div>
8672
8673     <div class="entry">
8674       <div class="title">
8675         <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>
8676       </div>
8677       <div class="date">
8678          3rd July 2010
8679       </div>
8680       <div class="body">
8681         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
8682 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
8683 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
8684 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
8685 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
8686 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
8687 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
8688 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
8689
8690 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
8691 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
8692 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
8693 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
8694 publish the difference.</p>
8695
8696 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
8697
8698 <blockquote><p>
8699   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
8700   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
8701   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
8702   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
8703   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
8704   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
8705   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
8706   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
8707 </p></blockquote>
8708
8709 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
8710
8711 <blockquote><p>
8712   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
8713   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
8714   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
8715   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
8716   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
8717   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
8718   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
8719   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
8720   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
8721   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
8722   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
8723   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
8724   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
8725   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
8726   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
8727   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
8728   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
8729   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
8730   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
8731   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
8732 </p></blockquote>
8733
8734 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8735
8736 <blockquote><p>
8737   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
8738   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
8739   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
8740   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
8741   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
8742   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
8743   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
8744   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
8745   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
8746   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
8747   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
8748   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
8749   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
8750   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
8751   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
8752   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
8753   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
8754   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
8755   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
8756   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
8757   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
8758 </p></blockquote>
8759
8760 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8761
8762 <blockquote><p>
8763   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
8764   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
8765   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
8766 </p></blockquote>
8767
8768 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
8769 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
8770 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
8771 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
8772 the difference somewhat.
8773
8774       </div>
8775       <div class="tags">
8776
8777
8778         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>.
8779
8780
8781       </div>
8782     </div>
8783     <div class="padding"></div>
8784
8785     <div class="entry">
8786       <div class="title">
8787         <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>
8788       </div>
8789       <div class="date">
8790          1st July 2010
8791       </div>
8792       <div class="body">
8793         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
8794 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
8795 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
8796 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
8797 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
8798 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
8799 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
8800 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
8801 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
8802
8803 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
8804
8805 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
8806 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
8807 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
8808 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
8809 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
8810 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
8811 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
8812 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
8813 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
8814 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
8815 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
8816 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
8817 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
8818 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
8819 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
8820
8821 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
8822
8823 <blockquote><pre>
8824 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
8825 </pre></blockquote>
8826
8827 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
8828 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
8829 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
8830 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
8831 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
8832 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
8833 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
8834 on how to get this working.</p>
8835
8836 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
8837 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
8838 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
8839 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
8840 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
8841 instructions I found in the
8842 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
8843 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
8844
8845 <blockquote><pre>
8846         debug-level             0
8847         reload-count            unlimited
8848         paranoia                no
8849
8850         enable-cache            passwd          yes
8851         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
8852         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
8853         suggested-size          passwd          211
8854         check-files             passwd          yes
8855         persistent              passwd          yes
8856         shared                  passwd          yes
8857         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
8858         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
8859
8860         enable-cache            group           yes
8861         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
8862         negative-time-to-live   group           20
8863         suggested-size          group           211
8864         check-files             group           yes
8865         persistent              group           yes
8866         shared                  group           yes
8867         max-db-size             group           33554432
8868         auto-propagate          group           yes
8869
8870         enable-cache            hosts           no
8871         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
8872         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
8873         suggested-size          hosts           211
8874         check-files             hosts           yes
8875         persistent              hosts           yes
8876         shared                  hosts           yes
8877         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
8878
8879         enable-cache            services        yes
8880         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
8881         negative-time-to-live   services        20
8882         suggested-size          services        211
8883         check-files             services        yes
8884         persistent              services        yes
8885         shared                  services        yes
8886         max-db-size             services        33554432
8887 </pre></blockquote>
8888
8889 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
8890 automatically like the one provided in
8891 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
8892 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
8893 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
8894 look like this:</p>
8895
8896 <blockquote><pre>
8897 passwd:         files ldap
8898 group:          files ldap
8899 shadow:         files ldap
8900 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
8901 networks:       files
8902 protocols:      files
8903 services:       files
8904 ethers:         files
8905 rpc:            files
8906 netgroup:       files ldap
8907 </pre></blockquote>
8908
8909 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
8910 shadow and netgroup.</p>
8911
8912 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
8913 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
8914 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
8915 attributes cached.
8916
8917 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
8918   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
8919
8920 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
8921 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
8922 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
8923 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
8924 discovered sssd.</p>
8925
8926 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
8927
8928 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
8929 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
8930 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
8931 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
8932 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
8933 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
8934 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
8935 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
8936 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
8937 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
8938 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
8939 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
8940 version 1.2 is now in testing.
8941
8942 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
8943 roaming setup I want</p>
8944
8945 <blockquote><pre>
8946 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
8947 </pre></blockquote>
8948
8949 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
8950 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
8951
8952 <blockquote><pre>
8953 [sssd]
8954 config_file_version = 2
8955 reconnection_retries = 3
8956 sbus_timeout = 30
8957 services = nss, pam
8958 domains = INTERN
8959
8960 [nss]
8961 filter_groups = root
8962 filter_users = root
8963 reconnection_retries = 3
8964
8965 [pam]
8966 reconnection_retries = 3
8967
8968 [domain/INTERN]
8969 enumerate = false
8970 cache_credentials = true
8971
8972 id_provider = ldap
8973 auth_provider = ldap
8974 chpass_provider = ldap
8975
8976 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
8977 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8978 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
8979 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
8980 </pre></blockquote>
8981
8982 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
8983 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
8984
8985 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
8986 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
8987 modify it manually.</p>
8988
8989 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
8990 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
8991
8992       </div>
8993       <div class="tags">
8994
8995
8996         Tags: <a href="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>.
8997
8998
8999       </div>
9000     </div>
9001     <div class="padding"></div>
9002
9003     <div class="entry">
9004       <div class="title">
9005         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
9006       </div>
9007       <div class="date">
9008         28th June 2010
9009       </div>
9010       <div class="body">
9011         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
9012 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
9013 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
9014 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
9015 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
9016 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
9017 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
9018 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
9019 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
9020 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
9021
9022 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
9023 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
9024 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
9025 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
9026 released.</p>
9027
9028 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
9029 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
9030 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
9031 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
9032
9033 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
9034 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9035
9036 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
9037 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
9038 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
9039 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
9040 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
9041
9042       </div>
9043       <div class="tags">
9044
9045
9046         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>.
9047
9048
9049       </div>
9050     </div>
9051     <div class="padding"></div>
9052
9053     <div class="entry">
9054       <div class="title">
9055         <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>
9056       </div>
9057       <div class="date">
9058         24th June 2010
9059       </div>
9060       <div class="body">
9061         <p>A while back, I
9062 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
9063 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
9064 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
9065 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
9066
9067 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
9068 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
9069 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
9070 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
9071
9072 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
9073 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
9074 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
9075 Debian Edu.</p>
9076
9077 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
9078 the
9079 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
9080 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
9081 available today from IETF.</p>
9082
9083 <pre>
9084 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
9085 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
9086 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
9087  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
9088         NAME 'dhcpHost'
9089         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
9090 -       SUP top
9091 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
9092         MUST cn
9093         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
9094         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
9095 </pre>
9096
9097 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
9098 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
9099 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
9100
9101 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9102 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9103
9104       </div>
9105       <div class="tags">
9106
9107
9108         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>.
9109
9110
9111       </div>
9112     </div>
9113     <div class="padding"></div>
9114
9115     <div class="entry">
9116       <div class="title">
9117         <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>
9118       </div>
9119       <div class="date">
9120         16th June 2010
9121       </div>
9122       <div class="body">
9123         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
9124 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
9125 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
9126 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
9127 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
9128 this:
9129
9130 <blockquote><pre>
9131 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9132 tasksel --new-install
9133 </pre></blockquote>
9134
9135 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
9136 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
9137 any output what so ever.
9138
9139 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
9140 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
9141 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
9142 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
9143 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
9144 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
9145 code like this:
9146
9147 <blockquote><pre>
9148 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9149 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
9150 $cmd
9151 </pre></blockquote>
9152
9153 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
9154 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
9155 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
9156 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
9157 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
9158 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
9159 installation.</p>
9160
9161 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
9162 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
9163 like this.</p>
9164
9165       </div>
9166       <div class="tags">
9167
9168
9169         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>.
9170
9171
9172       </div>
9173     </div>
9174     <div class="padding"></div>
9175
9176     <div class="entry">
9177       <div class="title">
9178         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
9179       </div>
9180       <div class="date">
9181         13th June 2010
9182       </div>
9183       <div class="body">
9184         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
9185 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
9186 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
9187 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
9188 pages.</p>
9189
9190 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
9191 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
9192 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
9193 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
9194 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
9195 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
9196 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
9197 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
9198 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
9199 see how the project is doing.</p>
9200
9201 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
9202 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
9203 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
9204 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
9205 Windows.  This is great.</p>
9206
9207       </div>
9208       <div class="tags">
9209
9210
9211         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>.
9212
9213
9214       </div>
9215     </div>
9216     <div class="padding"></div>
9217
9218     <div class="entry">
9219       <div class="title">
9220         <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>
9221       </div>
9222       <div class="date">
9223         13th June 2010
9224       </div>
9225       <div class="body">
9226         <p>My
9227 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
9228 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
9229 finally made the upgrade logs available from
9230 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
9231 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
9232 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
9233 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
9234
9235 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
9236 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
9237 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
9238 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
9239 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
9240 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
9241 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
9242 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
9243
9244 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
9245 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
9246 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
9247 too surprising.</p>
9248
9249 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
9250 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
9251 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
9252 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
9253 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
9254 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
9255 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
9256 continue.</p>
9257
9258 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
9259 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
9260   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
9261   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
9262   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
9263   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
9264   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
9265   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9266   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9267   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
9268   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
9269   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
9270   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
9271   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9272   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9273   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9274   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9275   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9276   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
9277   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
9278   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
9279   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
9280   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
9281   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
9282   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
9283   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
9284   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
9285   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
9286   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
9287   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
9288
9289 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
9290
9291 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
9292   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
9293   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
9294   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
9295   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
9296   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
9297   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
9298   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
9299   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
9300   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
9301   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
9302   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
9303   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
9304   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
9305   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
9306   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
9307   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
9308   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
9309   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
9310   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
9311   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
9312   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
9313   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
9314   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
9315   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
9316   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
9317   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
9318   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
9319   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
9320   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9321   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
9322   zip</p>
9323
9324 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
9325
9326 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
9327   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
9328   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
9329   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
9330   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
9331   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
9332   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9333   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9334   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
9335   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
9336   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
9337   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
9338   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9339   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9340   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9341   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9342   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9343   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
9344   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
9345   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
9346   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
9347   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
9348   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
9349   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
9350   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
9351   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
9352   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
9353   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
9354
9355 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
9356 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
9357   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
9358   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
9359   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
9360   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
9361   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
9362   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
9363   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
9364   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
9365   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
9366   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
9367   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
9368   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
9369   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
9370   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
9371   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
9372   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
9373   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
9374   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
9375   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
9376   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
9377   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
9378   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
9379   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
9380   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
9381   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
9382   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
9383   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
9384   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
9385   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
9386   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
9387   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
9388   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
9389   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
9390   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9391   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
9392   xulrunner-1.9</p>
9393
9394
9395       </div>
9396       <div class="tags">
9397
9398
9399         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>.
9400
9401
9402       </div>
9403     </div>
9404     <div class="padding"></div>
9405
9406     <div class="entry">
9407       <div class="title">
9408         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
9409       </div>
9410       <div class="date">
9411         11th June 2010
9412       </div>
9413       <div class="body">
9414         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
9415 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
9416 have been discovered and reported in the process
9417 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
9418 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
9419 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
9420 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
9421 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
9422
9423 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
9424 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
9425 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
9426 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
9427 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
9428 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
9429
9430 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
9431 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
9432 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
9433 is created.  The bug report
9434 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
9435 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
9436 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
9437 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
9438 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
9439 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
9440 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
9441 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
9442 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
9443 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
9444 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
9445 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
9446 Debian Squeeze.</p>
9447
9448 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
9449 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
9450 trick:</p>
9451
9452 <blockquote><pre>
9453 #!/bin/sh
9454 set -ex
9455
9456 if [ "$1" ] ; then
9457     desktop=$1
9458 else
9459     desktop=gnome
9460 fi
9461
9462 from=lenny
9463 to=squeeze
9464
9465 exec &lt; /dev/null
9466 unset LANG
9467 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
9468 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
9469 fuser -mv .
9470 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
9471 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
9472 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
9473 #!/bin/sh
9474 exit 101
9475 EOF
9476 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
9477 exit_cleanup() {
9478     umount $tmpdir/proc
9479 }
9480 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
9481 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
9482 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
9483
9484 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
9485
9486 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
9487 # to return the correct answers.
9488 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
9489     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
9490
9491 # Include the desktop and laptop task
9492 for test in desktop laptop ; do
9493     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
9494 #!/bin/sh
9495 exit 2
9496 EOF
9497     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
9498 done
9499
9500 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9501 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
9502 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
9503 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
9504
9505 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
9506 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
9507 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
9508 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
9509 fuser -mv
9510 </pre></blockquote>
9511
9512 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
9513 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
9514 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
9515 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
9516 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
9517 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
9518
9519 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
9520 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
9521 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
9522 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
9523 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
9524 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
9525 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
9526
9527 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
9528 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
9529 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
9530 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
9531 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
9532 packages.</p>
9533
9534       </div>
9535       <div class="tags">
9536
9537
9538         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>.
9539
9540
9541       </div>
9542     </div>
9543     <div class="padding"></div>
9544
9545     <div class="entry">
9546       <div class="title">
9547         <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>
9548       </div>
9549       <div class="date">
9550          6th June 2010
9551       </div>
9552       <div class="body">
9553         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
9554 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
9555 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
9556 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
9557 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
9558 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
9559 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
9560
9561 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
9562 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
9563 COLUMNS):</p>
9564
9565 <blockquote><pre>
9566 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
9567 previous=N
9568 PREVLEVEL=
9569 RUNLEVEL=
9570 runlevel=S
9571 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
9572 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
9573 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
9574 </pre></blockquote>
9575
9576 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
9577 script.</p>
9578
9579 <blockquote><pre>
9580 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
9581 previous=N
9582 PREVLEVEL=N
9583 RUNLEVEL=S
9584 runlevel=S
9585 </pre></blockquote>
9586
9587 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
9588 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
9589 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
9590
9591 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
9592 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
9593 choice.</p>
9594
9595       </div>
9596       <div class="tags">
9597
9598
9599         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>.
9600
9601
9602       </div>
9603     </div>
9604     <div class="padding"></div>
9605
9606     <div class="entry">
9607       <div class="title">
9608         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
9609       </div>
9610       <div class="date">
9611          6th June 2010
9612       </div>
9613       <div class="body">
9614         <p>Via the
9615 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
9616 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
9617 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
9618 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
9619 following the standards wars of today.</p>
9620
9621       </div>
9622       <div class="tags">
9623
9624
9625         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>.
9626
9627
9628       </div>
9629     </div>
9630     <div class="padding"></div>
9631
9632     <div class="entry">
9633       <div class="title">
9634         <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>
9635       </div>
9636       <div class="date">
9637          3rd June 2010
9638       </div>
9639       <div class="body">
9640         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
9641 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
9642 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
9643 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
9644 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
9645
9646 <blockquote><pre>
9647 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
9648   vendor                    count
9649   Dell Computer Corporation     1
9650     PowerEdge 1750              1
9651   IBM                           1
9652     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
9653   Intel                         2
9654   [no-dmi-info]                 3
9655 maintainer:~#
9656 </pre></blockquote>
9657
9658 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
9659 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
9660 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
9661 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
9662 option to list the individual machines.</p>
9663
9664 <p>A larger list is
9665 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
9666 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
9667 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
9668 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
9669 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
9670 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
9671 collector.</p>
9672
9673       </div>
9674       <div class="tags">
9675
9676
9677         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>.
9678
9679
9680       </div>
9681     </div>
9682     <div class="padding"></div>
9683
9684     <div class="entry">
9685       <div class="title">
9686         <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>
9687       </div>
9688       <div class="date">
9689          1st June 2010
9690       </div>
9691       <div class="body">
9692         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
9693 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
9694 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
9695 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
9696 wait.</p>
9697
9698 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
9699 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
9700 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
9701 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
9702 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
9703 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
9704
9705 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
9706 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
9707 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
9708 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
9709 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
9710 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
9711 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
9712 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
9713
9714 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
9715
9716       </div>
9717       <div class="tags">
9718
9719
9720         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>.
9721
9722
9723       </div>
9724     </div>
9725     <div class="padding"></div>
9726
9727     <div class="entry">
9728       <div class="title">
9729         <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>
9730       </div>
9731       <div class="date">
9732         27th May 2010
9733       </div>
9734       <div class="body">
9735         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
9736 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
9737 issues are known and should be solved:
9738
9739 <p><ul>
9740
9741 <li>The wicd package seen to
9742 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
9743 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
9744 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
9745 seem to be on the case.</li>
9746
9747 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
9748 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
9749 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
9750 maintainer is on the case.</li>
9751
9752 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
9753 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
9754 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
9755 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
9756 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
9757 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
9758 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
9759 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
9760
9761 </ul></p>
9762
9763 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
9764 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
9765 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
9766 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
9767
9768 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
9769 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
9770 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
9771 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
9772
9773 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
9774
9775       </div>
9776       <div class="tags">
9777
9778
9779         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>.
9780
9781
9782       </div>
9783     </div>
9784     <div class="padding"></div>
9785
9786     <div class="entry">
9787       <div class="title">
9788         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
9789       </div>
9790       <div class="date">
9791         22nd May 2010
9792       </div>
9793       <div class="body">
9794         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
9795 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
9796 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
9797 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
9798
9799 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
9800 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
9801 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
9802 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
9803 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
9804 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
9805 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
9806 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
9807 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
9808 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
9809 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
9810 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
9811 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
9812 going to work.</p>
9813
9814 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
9815 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
9816 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
9817 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
9818 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
9819 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
9820 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
9821 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
9822 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
9823 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
9824 Edu.</p>
9825
9826 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
9827 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
9828 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
9829 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
9830 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
9831 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
9832
9833 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
9834 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
9835
9836       </div>
9837       <div class="tags">
9838
9839
9840         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>.
9841
9842
9843       </div>
9844     </div>
9845     <div class="padding"></div>
9846
9847     <div class="entry">
9848       <div class="title">
9849         <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>
9850       </div>
9851       <div class="date">
9852         19th May 2010
9853       </div>
9854       <div class="body">
9855         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
9856 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
9857 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
9858 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
9859 into unstable.  The
9860 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
9861 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
9862 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
9863 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
9864 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
9865 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
9866 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
9867
9868 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
9869 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
9870 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
9871 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
9872 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
9873 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
9874 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
9875 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
9876
9877 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
9878 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
9879 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
9880 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
9881 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
9882 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
9883 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
9884
9885 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
9886 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
9887 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
9888 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
9889 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
9890 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
9891 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
9892 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
9893 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
9894 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
9895 on the home directory servers.</p>
9896
9897 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
9898 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
9899 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
9900 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
9901 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
9902 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
9903
9904 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9905 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9906
9907       </div>
9908       <div class="tags">
9909
9910
9911         Tags: <a href="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>.
9912
9913
9914       </div>
9915     </div>
9916     <div class="padding"></div>
9917
9918     <div class="entry">
9919       <div class="title">
9920         <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>
9921       </div>
9922       <div class="date">
9923         14th May 2010
9924       </div>
9925       <div class="body">
9926         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
9927 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
9928 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
9929 expected, if I am to believe the
9930 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
9931 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
9932 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
9933 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
9934 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
9935 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
9936 version.</p>
9937
9938 More information about
9939 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
9940 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
9941 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
9942 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
9943
9944 <blockquote><pre>
9945 CONCURRENCY=none
9946 </pre></blockquote>
9947
9948 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
9949 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
9950 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
9951 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
9952
9953       </div>
9954       <div class="tags">
9955
9956
9957         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>.
9958
9959
9960       </div>
9961     </div>
9962     <div class="padding"></div>
9963
9964     <div class="entry">
9965       <div class="title">
9966         <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>
9967       </div>
9968       <div class="date">
9969         14th May 2010
9970       </div>
9971       <div class="body">
9972         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
9973 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
9974 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
9975 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
9976 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
9977 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
9978 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
9979 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
9980
9981 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
9982 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
9983 this on the collector host:</p>
9984
9985 <blockquote><pre>
9986 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
9987 </pre></blockquote>
9988
9989 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
9990 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
9991
9992 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
9993 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
9994 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
9995 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
9996 written yet.</p>
9997
9998       </div>
9999       <div class="tags">
10000
10001
10002         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>.
10003
10004
10005       </div>
10006     </div>
10007     <div class="padding"></div>
10008
10009     <div class="entry">
10010       <div class="title">
10011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
10012       </div>
10013       <div class="date">
10014         13th May 2010
10015       </div>
10016       <div class="body">
10017         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
10018 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
10019 has been
10020 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
10021
10022 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
10023 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
10024 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
10025 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
10026 based boot system.  Tollef is
10027 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
10028 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
10029 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
10030 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
10031 at the moment do not.</p>
10032
10033 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
10034 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
10035 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
10036 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
10037 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
10038 way forward.</p>
10039
10040 <p>In the mean time, based on the
10041 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
10042 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
10043 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
10044 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
10045 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
10046 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
10047 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
10048 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
10049
10050       </div>
10051       <div class="tags">
10052
10053
10054         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>.
10055
10056
10057       </div>
10058     </div>
10059     <div class="padding"></div>
10060
10061     <div class="entry">
10062       <div class="title">
10063         <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>
10064       </div>
10065       <div class="date">
10066          6th May 2010
10067       </div>
10068       <div class="body">
10069         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
10070 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
10071 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
10072 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
10073 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10074 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
10075 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
10076
10077 <blockquote><pre>
10078 CONCURRENCY=makefile
10079 </pre></blockquote>
10080
10081 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
10082 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
10083 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
10084 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
10085 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
10086 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
10087 make this happen.</p>
10088
10089 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
10090 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
10091 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
10092 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
10093 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
10094
10095 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
10096 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
10097 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
10098 fix the remaining issues.</p>
10099
10100 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10101 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10102 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
10103 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
10104
10105       </div>
10106       <div class="tags">
10107
10108
10109         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>.
10110
10111
10112       </div>
10113     </div>
10114     <div class="padding"></div>
10115
10116     <div class="entry">
10117       <div class="title">
10118         <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>
10119       </div>
10120       <div class="date">
10121          2nd May 2010
10122       </div>
10123       <div class="body">
10124         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
10125 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
10126 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
10127
10128 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
10129 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
10130 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
10131 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
10132 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
10133
10134 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
10135 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
10136
10137 <blockquote><pre>
10138 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
10139 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
10140 Password expires                                        : never
10141 Password inactive                                       : never
10142 Account expires                                         : never
10143 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
10144 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
10145 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
10146 root@tjener:~#
10147 </pre></blockquote>
10148
10149 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
10150 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
10151 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
10152 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
10153 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
10154 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
10155
10156 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
10157 intended:</p>
10158
10159 <blockquote><pre>
10160 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
10161 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
10162 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
10163 Password expires                                        : never
10164 Password inactive                                       : never
10165 Account expires                                         : never
10166 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
10167 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
10168 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
10169 root@tjener:~#
10170 </pre></blockquote>
10171
10172 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
10173 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
10174 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
10175
10176 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
10177 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
10178
10179 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
10180 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
10181
10182 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
10183 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
10184 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
10185 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
10186 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
10187 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
10188 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
10189
10190 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
10191 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
10192 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
10193 change.</p>
10194
10195       </div>
10196       <div class="tags">
10197
10198
10199         Tags: <a href="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>.
10200
10201
10202       </div>
10203     </div>
10204     <div class="padding"></div>
10205
10206     <div class="entry">
10207       <div class="title">
10208         <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>
10209       </div>
10210       <div class="date">
10211         28th April 2010
10212       </div>
10213       <div class="body">
10214         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
10215 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
10216 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
10217 and go.</p>
10218
10219 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
10220 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
10221 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
10222 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
10223
10224 <ul>
10225
10226  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
10227    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
10228    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
10229    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
10230    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
10231    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
10232    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
10233    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
10234    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
10235    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
10236    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
10237    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
10238
10239  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
10240    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
10241    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
10242    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
10243    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
10244    or the Fedora developed
10245    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
10246    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
10247
10248  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
10249    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
10250    directory, using unison.</li>
10251
10252  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
10253    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
10254    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
10255    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
10256    implemented.</li>
10257
10258  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
10259    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
10260
10261  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
10262    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
10263    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
10264
10265 </ul>
10266
10267 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
10268 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
10269 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
10270 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
10271 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
10272 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
10273 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
10274 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
10275 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
10276
10277 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
10278 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
10279
10280       </div>
10281       <div class="tags">
10282
10283
10284         Tags: <a href="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>.
10285
10286
10287       </div>
10288     </div>
10289     <div class="padding"></div>
10290
10291     <div class="entry">
10292       <div class="title">
10293         <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>
10294       </div>
10295       <div class="date">
10296         19th April 2010
10297       </div>
10298       <div class="body">
10299         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
10300 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
10301 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
10302 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
10303 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
10304 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
10305 restrictions on the web, for example from
10306 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
10307 epub-version from
10308 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
10309 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
10310 strongly recommend this book.</p>
10311
10312       </div>
10313       <div class="tags">
10314
10315
10316         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>.
10317
10318
10319       </div>
10320     </div>
10321     <div class="padding"></div>
10322
10323     <div class="entry">
10324       <div class="title">
10325         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
10326       </div>
10327       <div class="date">
10328         14th April 2010
10329       </div>
10330       <div class="body">
10331         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
10332 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
10333 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
10334 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
10335 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
10336 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
10337 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
10338 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
10339 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
10340
10341 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
10342 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
10343 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
10344 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
10345 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
10346
10347 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
10348 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
10349
10350 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
10351 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
10352 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
10353 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
10354 to work properly.</p>
10355
10356 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
10357 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
10358 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
10359 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
10360 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
10361 time.</p>
10362
10363 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
10364 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
10365 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
10366 up in a few days.</p>
10367
10368       </div>
10369       <div class="tags">
10370
10371
10372         Tags: <a href="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>.
10373
10374
10375       </div>
10376     </div>
10377     <div class="padding"></div>
10378
10379     <div class="entry">
10380       <div class="title">
10381         <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>
10382       </div>
10383       <div class="date">
10384          6th March 2010
10385       </div>
10386       <div class="body">
10387         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
10388 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
10389 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
10390 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
10391 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
10392 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
10393
10394 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
10395 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
10396 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
10397 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
10398
10399 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
10400 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
10401 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
10402 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
10403 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
10404 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
10405
10406       </div>
10407       <div class="tags">
10408
10409
10410         Tags: <a href="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>.
10411
10412
10413       </div>
10414     </div>
10415     <div class="padding"></div>
10416
10417     <div class="entry">
10418       <div class="title">
10419         <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>
10420       </div>
10421       <div class="date">
10422         11th February 2010
10423       </div>
10424       <div class="body">
10425         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
10426 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
10427 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
10428 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
10429 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
10430 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
10431 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
10432
10433 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
10434
10435 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
10436 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
10437 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
10438 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
10439
10440       </div>
10441       <div class="tags">
10442
10443
10444         Tags: <a href="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>.
10445
10446
10447       </div>
10448     </div>
10449     <div class="padding"></div>
10450
10451     <div class="entry">
10452       <div class="title">
10453         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
10454       </div>
10455       <div class="date">
10456         27th January 2010
10457       </div>
10458       <div class="body">
10459         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
10460 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
10461 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
10462 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
10463 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
10464 further.</p>
10465
10466 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
10467 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
10468 configured to be a server for the
10469 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
10470 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
10471 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
10472 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
10473 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
10474 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
10475 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
10476 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
10477 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
10478 and Nagios configuration.</p>
10479
10480 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
10481 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
10482 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
10483 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
10484
10485 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
10486 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
10487 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
10488 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
10489 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
10490 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
10491 the machine.</p>
10492
10493 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
10494 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
10495 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
10496 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
10497
10498 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
10499 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
10500 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
10501 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
10502 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
10503 everything is taken care of.</p>
10504
10505       </div>
10506       <div class="tags">
10507
10508
10509         Tags: <a href="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>.
10510
10511
10512       </div>
10513     </div>
10514     <div class="padding"></div>
10515
10516     <div class="entry">
10517       <div class="title">
10518         <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>
10519       </div>
10520       <div class="date">
10521         12th August 2009
10522       </div>
10523       <div class="body">
10524         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
10525 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
10526 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
10527 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
10528
10529 <table>
10530 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
10531 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
10532 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
10533 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
10534 </table>
10535
10536 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
10537 got these numbers:</p>
10538
10539 <table>
10540 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
10541 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
10542 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
10543 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
10544 </table>
10545
10546 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
10547
10548 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
10549 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
10550 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
10551 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
10552 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
10553
10554
10555 <table>
10556 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
10557 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
10558 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
10559 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
10560 </table>
10561
10562 <p>And with 'site:no':
10563
10564 <table>
10565 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
10566 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
10567 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
10568 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
10569 </table>
10570
10571 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
10572 numbers.</p>
10573
10574       </div>
10575       <div class="tags">
10576
10577
10578         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>.
10579
10580
10581       </div>
10582     </div>
10583     <div class="padding"></div>
10584
10585     <div class="entry">
10586       <div class="title">
10587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
10588       </div>
10589       <div class="date">
10590          8th August 2009
10591       </div>
10592       <div class="body">
10593         <p>According to <a
10594 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
10595 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
10596 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
10597 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
10598 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
10599 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
10600 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
10601 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
10602 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
10603 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
10604
10605 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
10606 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
10607 seminar this autumn.</p>
10608
10609       </div>
10610       <div class="tags">
10611
10612
10613         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>.
10614
10615
10616       </div>
10617     </div>
10618     <div class="padding"></div>
10619
10620     <div class="entry">
10621       <div class="title">
10622         <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>
10623       </div>
10624       <div class="date">
10625         27th July 2009
10626       </div>
10627       <div class="body">
10628         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
10629 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
10630 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
10631 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
10632 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
10633 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
10634 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
10635
10636 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
10637 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
10638 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
10639
10640       </div>
10641       <div class="tags">
10642
10643
10644         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>.
10645
10646
10647       </div>
10648     </div>
10649     <div class="padding"></div>
10650
10651     <div class="entry">
10652       <div class="title">
10653         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
10654       </div>
10655       <div class="date">
10656         22nd July 2009
10657       </div>
10658       <div class="body">
10659         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
10660 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
10661 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
10662 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
10663 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
10664 the package up to date.</p>
10665
10666 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
10667 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
10668 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
10669 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
10670 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
10671 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
10672 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
10673 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
10674 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
10675 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
10676 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
10677 working on the future release.</p>
10678
10679 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
10680 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
10681
10682       </div>
10683       <div class="tags">
10684
10685
10686         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>.
10687
10688
10689       </div>
10690     </div>
10691     <div class="padding"></div>
10692
10693     <div class="entry">
10694       <div class="title">
10695         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
10696       </div>
10697       <div class="date">
10698         24th June 2009
10699       </div>
10700       <div class="body">
10701         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
10702 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
10703 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
10704 funded
10705 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
10706 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
10707 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
10708 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
10709 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
10710 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
10711
10712 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
10713 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
10714 boot:</p>
10715
10716 <ul>
10717
10718 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
10719
10720 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
10721    clock is in UTC.</li>
10722
10723 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
10724    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10725    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
10726
10727 </ul>
10728
10729 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
10730 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
10731 Villegas</a>.
10732
10733 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
10734 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
10735 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
10736 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
10737 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
10738 using this.</p>
10739
10740 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
10741 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
10742 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
10743 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
10744 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
10745 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
10746 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
10747
10748       </div>
10749       <div class="tags">
10750
10751
10752         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>.
10753
10754
10755       </div>
10756     </div>
10757     <div class="padding"></div>
10758
10759     <div class="entry">
10760       <div class="title">
10761         <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>
10762       </div>
10763       <div class="date">
10764          2nd May 2009
10765       </div>
10766       <div class="body">
10767         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
10768 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
10769 do not yet know them.</p>
10770
10771 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
10772 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
10773 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
10774 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
10775 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
10776 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
10777 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
10778 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
10779 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
10780 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
10781 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
10782
10783 <p>The second one is
10784 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
10785 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
10786 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
10787 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
10788 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
10789 and the company behind it is running
10790 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
10791 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
10792 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
10793 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
10794 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
10795 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
10796 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
10797 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
10798
10799 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
10800 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
10801 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
10802 surrounded by today.</p>
10803
10804       </div>
10805       <div class="tags">
10806
10807
10808         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>.
10809
10810
10811       </div>
10812     </div>
10813     <div class="padding"></div>
10814
10815     <div class="entry">
10816       <div class="title">
10817         <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>
10818       </div>
10819       <div class="date">
10820         28th April 2009
10821       </div>
10822       <div class="body">
10823         <p>Julien Blache
10824 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
10825 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
10826 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
10827 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
10828 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
10829 properties.</p>
10830
10831       </div>
10832       <div class="tags">
10833
10834
10835         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>.
10836
10837
10838       </div>
10839     </div>
10840     <div class="padding"></div>
10841
10842     <div class="entry">
10843       <div class="title">
10844         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
10845       </div>
10846       <div class="date">
10847          5th April 2009
10848       </div>
10849       <div class="body">
10850         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
10851 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
10852 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
10853 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
10854 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
10855 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
10856 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
10857 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
10858
10859 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
10860 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
10861 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
10862   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
10863   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
10864
10865 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
10866 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
10867 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
10868 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
10869
10870 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
10871 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
10872 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
10873 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
10874
10875 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
10876 set -e
10877 URL="$1"
10878 SAVEFILE="$2"
10879 DURATION="$3"
10880 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
10881   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
10882   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
10883 pid=$!
10884 sleep $DURATION
10885 kill $pid
10886 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
10887
10888       </div>
10889       <div class="tags">
10890
10891
10892         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>.
10893
10894
10895       </div>
10896     </div>
10897     <div class="padding"></div>
10898
10899     <div class="entry">
10900       <div class="title">
10901         <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>
10902       </div>
10903       <div class="date">
10904         30th March 2009
10905       </div>
10906       <div class="body">
10907         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
10908 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
10909 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
10910 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
10911 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
10912 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
10913 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
10914 application.</p>
10915
10916 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
10917 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
10918 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
10919 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
10920 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
10921 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
10922 blocked from doing so.</p>
10923
10924 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
10925 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
10926 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
10927 requirements change.</p>
10928
10929 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
10930 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
10931 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
10932
10933       </div>
10934       <div class="tags">
10935
10936
10937         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>.
10938
10939
10940       </div>
10941     </div>
10942     <div class="padding"></div>
10943
10944     <div class="entry">
10945       <div class="title">
10946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
10947       </div>
10948       <div class="date">
10949         29th March 2009
10950       </div>
10951       <div class="body">
10952         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
10953 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
10954 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
10955 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
10956 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
10957 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
10958 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
10959 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
10960 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
10961 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
10962 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
10963 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
10964 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
10965 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
10966 now. :)</p>
10967
10968       </div>
10969       <div class="tags">
10970
10971
10972         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>.
10973
10974
10975       </div>
10976     </div>
10977     <div class="padding"></div>
10978
10979     <div class="entry">
10980       <div class="title">
10981         <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>
10982       </div>
10983       <div class="date">
10984         29th March 2009
10985       </div>
10986       <div class="body">
10987         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
10988 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
10989 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
10990 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
10991 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
10992 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
10993
10994 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
10995 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
10996 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
10997 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
10998 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
10999 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
11000 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
11001 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
11002 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
11003 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
11004 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
11005 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
11006 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
11007
11008 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
11009 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
11010 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
11011 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
11012
11013 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
11014 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
11015
11016 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
11017 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
11018 new IETF work group?</p>
11019
11020       </div>
11021       <div class="tags">
11022
11023
11024         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>.
11025
11026
11027       </div>
11028     </div>
11029     <div class="padding"></div>
11030
11031     <div class="entry">
11032       <div class="title">
11033         <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>
11034       </div>
11035       <div class="date">
11036         28th February 2009
11037       </div>
11038       <div class="body">
11039         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
11040 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
11041 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
11042 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
11043 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
11044 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
11045 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
11046 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
11047 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
11048 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
11049 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
11050 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
11051 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
11052 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
11053 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
11054 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
11055 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
11056 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
11057 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
11058 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
11059 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
11060 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
11061 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
11062 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
11063 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
11064 machine.</p>
11065
11066 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
11067 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
11068 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
11069 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
11070 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
11071 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
11072 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
11073
11074 <pre>
11075 use LWP::Simple;
11076 use POSIX;
11077 use WWW::Mechanize;
11078 use Date::Parse;
11079 [...]
11080 sub get_support_info {
11081     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
11082     my $str;
11083
11084     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
11085         # fetch website from Dell support
11086         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";
11087         my $webpage = get($url);
11088         return undef unless ($webpage);
11089
11090         my $daysleft = -1;
11091         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
11092         foreach my $line (@lines) {
11093             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
11094             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
11095             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
11096
11097             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
11098             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
11099             my $lastend = "";
11100             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
11101                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
11102
11103                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
11104                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
11105                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
11106                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
11107                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
11108                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
11109                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
11110             }
11111             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
11112             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
11113                 if ($lastend lt $today);
11114         }
11115     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
11116         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
11117         my $url =
11118             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
11119         $mech->get($url);
11120         my $fields = {
11121             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
11122             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
11123             'country' => 'NO',
11124             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
11125             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
11126         };
11127         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
11128                             fields      => $fields );
11129         # Next step is screen scraping
11130         my $content = $mech->content();
11131
11132         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
11133         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
11134         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
11135         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
11136
11137         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
11138
11139         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
11140             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
11141                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
11142             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
11143             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
11144                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
11145             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
11146                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
11147
11148             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
11149
11150             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
11151                 if ($end lt $today);
11152         }
11153     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
11154         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
11155         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
11156         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
11157             my $content =
11158                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
11159             if ($content) {
11160                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
11161                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
11162                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
11163                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
11164
11165                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
11166                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
11167
11168                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
11169
11170                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
11171                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
11172                     if ($end lt $today);
11173             }
11174         }
11175     }
11176     return $str;
11177 }
11178 </pre>
11179
11180 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
11181 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
11182 from dmidecode.</p>
11183
11184 <pre>
11185 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
11186                        "447707-B21");
11187 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
11188 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
11189                        "1234567");
11190 </pre>
11191
11192 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
11193 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
11194
11195 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
11196 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
11197 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
11198 do so.</p>
11199
11200       </div>
11201       <div class="tags">
11202
11203
11204         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>.
11205
11206
11207       </div>
11208     </div>
11209     <div class="padding"></div>
11210
11211     <div class="entry">
11212       <div class="title">
11213         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
11214       </div>
11215       <div class="date">
11216         20th February 2009
11217       </div>
11218       <div class="body">
11219         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
11220 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
11221 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
11222 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
11223 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
11224 the "missing" computer.</p>
11225
11226 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
11227 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
11228 code blocks as defined in the
11229 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
11230 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
11231 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
11232 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
11233 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
11234 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
11235 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
11236 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
11237 codes.</p>
11238
11239 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
11240 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
11241 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
11242 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
11243 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
11244 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
11245
11246 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
11247 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
11248 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
11249 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
11250 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
11251 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
11252 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
11253 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
11254 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
11255 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
11256
11257 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
11258 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
11259 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
11260
11261       </div>
11262       <div class="tags">
11263
11264
11265         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>.
11266
11267
11268       </div>
11269     </div>
11270     <div class="padding"></div>
11271
11272     <div class="entry">
11273       <div class="title">
11274         <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>
11275       </div>
11276       <div class="date">
11277         17th January 2009
11278       </div>
11279       <div class="body">
11280         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
11281 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
11282 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
11283 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
11284 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
11285 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
11286 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
11287 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
11288 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
11289 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
11290 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
11291 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
11292 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
11293 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
11294
11295 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
11296 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
11297 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
11298 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
11299 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
11300 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
11301 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
11302 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
11303 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
11304 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
11305 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
11306 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
11307 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
11308 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
11309 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
11310 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
11311 playing when the download is done.</p>
11312
11313 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
11314 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
11315 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
11316 too.</p>
11317
11318 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
11319 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
11320 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
11321 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
11322
11323       </div>
11324       <div class="tags">
11325
11326
11327         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>.
11328
11329
11330       </div>
11331     </div>
11332     <div class="padding"></div>
11333
11334     <div class="entry">
11335       <div class="title">
11336         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
11337       </div>
11338       <div class="date">
11339         28th December 2008
11340       </div>
11341       <div class="body">
11342         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
11343 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
11344 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
11345 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
11346 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
11347 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
11348 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
11349 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
11350 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
11351 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
11352 source, sink and mixer applications and
11353 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
11354 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
11355 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
11356 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
11357 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
11358 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
11359 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
11360 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
11361 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
11362
11363 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
11364 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
11365 larger stick as well.</p>
11366
11367       </div>
11368       <div class="tags">
11369
11370
11371         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>.
11372
11373
11374       </div>
11375     </div>
11376     <div class="padding"></div>
11377
11378     <div class="entry">
11379       <div class="title">
11380         <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>
11381       </div>
11382       <div class="date">
11383          7th December 2008
11384       </div>
11385       <div class="body">
11386         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
11387 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
11388 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
11389 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
11390 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
11391 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
11392 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
11393 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
11394
11395 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
11396 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
11397 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
11398 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
11399 of these cards.</p>
11400
11401       </div>
11402       <div class="tags">
11403
11404
11405         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>.
11406
11407
11408       </div>
11409     </div>
11410     <div class="padding"></div>
11411
11412     <div class="entry">
11413       <div class="title">
11414         <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>
11415       </div>
11416       <div class="date">
11417         25th November 2008
11418       </div>
11419       <div class="body">
11420         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
11421 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
11422 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
11423 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
11424 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
11425 notes are available on
11426 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
11427 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
11428 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
11429 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
11430 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
11431 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
11432 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
11433 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
11434 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
11435
11436 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
11437 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
11438
11439       </div>
11440       <div class="tags">
11441
11442
11443         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>.
11444
11445
11446       </div>
11447     </div>
11448     <div class="padding"></div>
11449
11450     <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>
11451     <div id="sidebar">
11452
11453
11454
11455 <h2>Archive</h2>
11456 <ul>
11457
11458 <li>2012
11459 <ul>
11460
11461 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
11462
11463 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
11464
11465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
11466
11467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
11468
11469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
11470
11471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
11472
11473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
11474
11475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
11476
11477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (4)</a></li>
11478
11479 </ul></li>
11480
11481 <li>2011
11482 <ul>
11483
11484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
11485
11486 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
11487
11488 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
11489
11490 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
11491
11492 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
11493
11494 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
11495
11496 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
11497
11498 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
11499
11500 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
11501
11502 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
11503
11504 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
11505
11506 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
11507
11508 </ul></li>
11509
11510 <li>2010
11511 <ul>
11512
11513 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
11514
11515 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
11516
11517 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
11518
11519 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
11520
11521 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
11522
11523 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
11524
11525 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
11526
11527 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
11528
11529 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
11530
11531 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
11532
11533 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
11534
11535 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
11536
11537 </ul></li>
11538
11539 <li>2009
11540 <ul>
11541
11542 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
11543
11544 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
11545
11546 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
11547
11548 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
11549
11550 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
11551
11552 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
11553
11554 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
11555
11556 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
11557
11558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
11559
11560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
11561
11562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
11563
11564 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
11565
11566 </ul></li>
11567
11568 <li>2008
11569 <ul>
11570
11571 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
11572
11573 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
11574
11575 </ul></li>
11576
11577 </ul>
11578
11579
11580
11581 <h2>Tags</h2>
11582 <ul>
11583
11584  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
11585
11586  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
11587
11588  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
11589
11590  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (2)</a></li>
11591
11592  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (12)</a></li>
11593
11594  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
11595
11596  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (57)</a></li>
11597
11598  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (111)</a></li>
11599
11600  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (9)</a></li>
11601
11602  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (6)</a></li>
11603
11604  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
11605
11606  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (150)</a></li>
11607
11608  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (17)</a></li>
11609
11610  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
11611
11612  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (7)</a></li>
11613
11614  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (8)</a></li>
11615
11616  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (30)</a></li>
11617
11618  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (16)</a></li>
11619
11620  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
11621
11622  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (4)</a></li>
11623
11624  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
11625
11626  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (25)</a></li>
11627
11628  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (194)</a></li>
11629
11630  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (143)</a></li>
11631
11632  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (4)</a></li>
11633
11634  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
11635
11636  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (35)</a></li>
11637
11638  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (49)</a></li>
11639
11640  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
11641
11642  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
11643
11644  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (2)</a></li>
11645
11646  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (4)</a></li>
11647
11648  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
11649
11650  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
11651
11652  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
11653
11654  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (23)</a></li>
11655
11656  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
11657
11658  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (1)</a></li>
11659
11660  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (37)</a></li>
11661
11662  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (1)</a></li>
11663
11664  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (4)</a></li>
11665
11666  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (10)</a></li>
11667
11668  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (7)</a></li>
11669
11670  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (34)</a></li>
11671
11672  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (1)</a></li>
11673
11674  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (25)</a></li>
11675
11676 </ul>
11677
11678
11679     </div>
11680     <p style="text-align: right">
11681  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.4</a>
11682 </p>
11683
11684   </body>
11685 </html>