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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_oggz_release_1_1_2_after_15_years.html">New oggz release 1.1.2 after 15 years</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          9th February 2025
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>A little over a week ago, I noticed
  32 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/liboggz">the liboggz
  33 package</a> on my Debian dashboard had not had a new upstream release
  34 for a while.  A closer look showed that its last release, version
  35 1.1.1, happened in 2010.  A few patches had accumulated in the Debian
  36 package, and I even noticed that I had passed on these patches to
  37 upstream five years ago.  A handful crash bugs had been reported
  38 against the Debian package, and looking at the upstream repository I
  39 even found a few crash bugs reported there too.  To add insult to
  40 injury, I discovered that upstream had accumulated several fixes in the
  41 years between 2010 and now, and many of them had not made their way
  42 into the Debian package.  I decided enough was enough, and that a new
  43 upstream release was needed fixing these nasty crash bugs.  Luckily I
  44 am also a member of the Xiph team, aka upstream, and could actually go
  45 to work immediately to fix it.</p>
  46
  47 <p>I started by adding automatic build testing on
  48 <a href="https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/liboggz">the Xiph gitlab oggz
  49 instance</a>, to get a better idea of the state of affairs with the
  50 code base.  This exposed a few build problems, which I had to fix.  In
  51 parallel to this, I sent an email announcing my wish for a new release
  52 to every person who had committed to the upstream code base since
  53 2010, and asked for help doing a new release both on email and on the
  54 #xiph IRC channel.  Sadly only a fraction of their email providers
  55 accepted my email.  But Ralph Giles in the Xiph team came to the
  56 rescue and provided invaluable help to guide be through the release
  57 Xiph process.  While this was going on, I spent a few days tracking
  58 down the crash bugs with good help from
  59 <a href="https://www.valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, and came up with
  60 patch proposals to get rid of at least these specific crash bugs.  The
  61 open issues also had to be checked.  Several of them proved to be
  62 fixed already, but a few I had to creat patches for.  I also checked
  63 out the Debian, Arch, Fedora, Suse and Gentoo packages to see if there
  64 were patches applied in these Linux distributions that should be
  65 passed upstream.  The end result was ready yesterday.  A new liboggz
  66 release, version 1.1.2, was tagged, wrapped up and published on the
  67 project page.  And today, the new release was uploaded into
  68 Debian.</p>
  69
  70 <p>You are probably by now curious on what actually changed in the
  71 library.  I guess the most interesting new feature was support for
  72 Opus and VP8.  Almost all other changes were stability or
  73 documentation fixes.  The rest were related to the gitlab continuous
  74 integration testing.  All in all, this was really a minor update,
  75 hence the version bump only from 1.1.1 to to 1.1.2, but it was long
  76 overdue and I am very happy that it is out the door.</p>
  77
  78 <p>One change proposed upstream was not included this time, as it
  79 extended the API and changed some of the existing library methods, and
  80 thus require a major SONAME bump and possibly code changes in every
  81 program using the library.  As I am not that familiar with the code
  82 base, I am unsure if I am the right person to evaluate the change.
  83 Perhaps later.</p>
  84
  85 <p>Since the release was tagged, a few minor fixes has been committed
  86 upstream already: automatic testing the cross building to Windows, and
  87 documentation updates linking to the correct project page.  If a
  88 important issue is discovered with this release, I guess a new release
  89 might happen soon including the minor fixes.  If not, perhaps they can
  90 wait fifteen years. :)</p>
  91
  92 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  93 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  94 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  95
  96       </div>
  97       <div class="tags">
  98
  99
 100         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/121_packages_in_Debian_mapped_to_hardware_for_automatic_recommendation.html">121 packages in Debian mapped to hardware for automatic recommendation</a>
 110       </div>
 111       <div class="date">
 112         19th January 2025
 113       </div>
 114       <div class="body">
 115         <p>For some years now, I have been working on a automatic hardware
 116 based package recommendation system for Debian and other Linux
 117 distributions.  The isenkram system I started on back in 2013 now
 118 consist of two subsystems, one locating firmware files using the
 119 information provided by apt-file, and one matching hardware to
 120 packages using information provided by AppStream.  The former is very
 121 similar to the mechanism implemented in debian-installer to pick the
 122 right firmware packages to install. This post is about the latter
 123 system.  Thanks to steady progress and good help from both other
 124 Debian and upstream developers, I am happy to report that
 125 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the Isenkram
 126 system</a> now are able to recommend 121 packages using information
 127 provided via
 128 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/">AppStream</a>.</p>
 129
 130 <p>The mapping is done using modalias information provided by the
 131 kernel, the same information used by udev when creating device files,
 132 and the kernel when deciding which kernel modules to load.  To get all
 133 the modalias identifiers relevant for your machine, you can run the
 134 following command on the command line:</p>
 135
 136 <pre>
 137 find /sys/devices -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 sort -u
 138 </pre>
 139
 140 <p>The modalias identifiers can look something like this:</p>
 141
 142 <pre>
 143 acpi:PNP0000
 144 cpu:type:x86,ven0000fam0006mod003F:feature:,0000,0001,0002,0003,0004,0005,0006,0007,0008,0009,000B,000C,000D,000E,000F,0010,0011,0013,0015,0016,0017,0018,0019,001A,001B,001C,001D,001F,002B,0034,003A,003B,003D,0068,006B,006C,006D,006F,0070,0072,0074,0075,0076,0078,0079,007C,0080,0081,0082,0083,0084,0085,0086,0087,0088,0089,008B,008C,008D,008E,008F,0091,0092,0093,0094,0095,0096,0097,0098,0099,009A,009B,009C,009D,009E,00C0,00C5,00E1,00E3,00EB,00ED,00F0,00F1,00F3,00F5,00F6,00F9,00FA,00FB,00FD,00FF,0100,0101,0102,0103,0111,0120,0121,0123,0125,0127,0128,0129,012A,012C,012D,0140,0160,0161,0165,016C,017B,01C0,01C1,01C2,01C4,01C5,01C6,01F9,024A,025A,025B,025C,025F,0282
 145 dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvr2.18.1:bd08/14/2023:br2.18:svnDellInc.:pnPowerEdgeR730:pvr:rvnDellInc.:rn0H21J3:rvrA09:cvnDellInc.:ct23:cvr:skuSKU=NotProvided
 146 pci:v00008086d00008D3Bsv00001028sd00000600bc07sc80i00
 147 platform:serial8250
 148 scsi:t-0x05
 149 usb:v413CpA001d0000dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00in00
 150 </pre>
 151
 152 <p>The entries above are a selection of the complete set available on
 153 a Dell PowerEdge R730 machine I have access to, to give an idea about
 154 the various styles of hardware identifiers presented in the modalias
 155 format.  When looking up relevant packages in a Debian Testing
 156 installation on the same R730, I get this list of packages
 157 proposed:</p>
 158
 159 <pre>
 160 % sudo isenkram-lookup
 161 firmware-bnx2x
 162 firmware-nvidia-graphics
 163 firmware-qlogic
 164 megactl
 165 wsl
 166 %
 167 </pre>
 168
 169 <p>The list consist of firmware packages requested by kernel modules,
 170 as well packages with program to get the status from the RAID
 171 controller and to maintain the LAN console.  When the edac-utils
 172 package providing tools to check the ECC RAM status will enter testing
 173 in a few days, it will also show up as a proposal from isenkram.  In
 174 addition, once the mfiutil package we uploaded in October get past the
 175 NEW processing, it will also propose a tool to configure the RAID
 176 controller.</p>
 177
 178 <p>Another example is the trusty old Lenovo Thinkpad X230, which have
 179 hardware handled by several packages in the archive.  This is running
 180 on Debian Stable:</p>
 181
 182 <pre>
 183 % isenkram-lookup
 184 beignet-opencl-icd
 185 bluez
 186 cheese
 187 ethtool
 188 firmware-iwlwifi
 189 firmware-misc-nonfree
 190 fprintd
 191 fprintd-demo
 192 gkrellm-thinkbat
 193 hdapsd
 194 libpam-fprintd
 195 pidgin-blinklight
 196 thinkfan
 197 tlp
 198 tp-smapi-dkms
 199 tpb
 200 %
 201 </pre>
 202
 203 <p>Here there proposal consist of software to handle the camera,
 204 bluetooth, network card, wifi card, GPU, fan, fingerprint reader and
 205 acceleration sensor on the machine.</p>
 206
 207 <p>Here is the complete set of packages currently providing hardware
 208 mapping via AppStream in Debian Unstable: air-quality-sensor,
 209 alsa-firmware-loaders, antpm, array-info, avarice, avrdude,
 210 bmusb-v4l2proxy, brltty, calibre, colorhug-client, concordance-common,
 211 consolekit, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux, edac-utils,
 212 eegdev-plugins-free, ekeyd, elogind, firmware-amd-graphics,
 213 firmware-ath9k-htc, firmware-atheros, firmware-b43-installer,
 214 firmware-b43legacy-installer, firmware-bnx2, firmware-bnx2x,
 215 firmware-brcm80211, firmware-carl9170, firmware-cavium,
 216 firmware-intel-graphics, firmware-intel-misc, firmware-ipw2x00,
 217 firmware-ivtv, firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-libertas,
 218 firmware-linux-free, firmware-mediatek, firmware-misc-nonfree,
 219 firmware-myricom, firmware-netronome, firmware-netxen,
 220 firmware-nvidia-graphics, firmware-qcom-soc, firmware-qlogic,
 221 firmware-realtek, firmware-ti-connectivity, fpga-icestorm, g810-led,
 222 galileo, garmin-forerunner-tools, gkrellm-thinkbat, goldencheetah,
 223 gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, i8kutils, imsprog, ledger-wallets-udev,
 224 libairspy0, libam7xxx0.1, libbladerf2, libgphoto2-6t64,
 225 libhamlib-utils, libm2k0.9.0, libmirisdr4, libnxt, libopenxr1-monado,
 226 libosmosdr0, librem5-flash-image, librtlsdr0, libticables2-8,
 227 libx52pro0, libykpers-1-1, libyubikey-udev, limesuite,
 228 linuxcnc-uspace, lomoco, madwimax, media-player-info, megactl, mixxx,
 229 mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mu-editor, mustang-plug, nbc, nitrokey-app, nqc,
 230 ola, openfpgaloader, openocd, openrazer-driver-dkms, pcmciautils,
 231 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, ponyprog, printer-driver-splix,
 232 python-yubico-tools, python3-btchip, qlcplus, rosegarden, scdaemon,
 233 sispmctl, solaar, spectools, sunxi-tools, t2n, thinkfan, tlp,
 234 tp-smapi-dkms, trezor, tucnak, ubertooth, usbrelay, uuu, viking,
 235 w1retap, wsl, xawtv, xinput-calibrator, xserver-xorg-input-wacom and
 236 xtrx-dkms.</p>
 237
 238 <p>In addition to these, there are several
 239 <a href="https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=pere%40hungry.com&tag=appstream-modalias">with
 240 patches pending in the Debian bug tracking system</a>, and even more
 241 where no-one wrote patches yet.  Good candiates for the latter are
 242 packages
 243 <a href="https://udd.debian.org/lintian-tag.cgi?tag=appstream-metadata-missing-modalias-provide">with
 244 udev rules but no AppStream hardware information</a>.</p>
 245
 246 <p>The isenkram system consist of two packages, isenkram-cli with the
 247 command line tools, and isenkram with a GUI background process.  The
 248 latter will listen for dbus events from udev emitted when new hardware
 249 become available (like when inserting a USB dongle or discovering a
 250 new bluetooth device), look up the modalias entry for this piece of
 251 hardware in AppStream (and a hard coded list of mappings from isenkram
 252 - currently working hard to move this list to AppStream), and pop up a
 253 dialog proposing to install any not already installed packages
 254 supporting this hardware.  It work very well today when inserting the
 255 LEGO Mindstorms RCX, NXT and EV3 controllers. :) If you want to make
 256 sure more hardware related packages get recommended, please help out
 257 fixing the remaining packages in Debian to provide AppStream metadata
 258 with hardware mappings.</p>
 259
 260 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 261 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 262 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 263
 264       </div>
 265       <div class="tags">
 266
 267
 268         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 269
 270
 271       </div>
 272     </div>
 273     <div class="padding"></div>
 274
 275     <div class="entry">
 276       <div class="title">
 277         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2025_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2025?</a>
 278       </div>
 279       <div class="date">
 280         18th January 2025
 281       </div>
 282       <div class="body">
 283         <p><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">Seven</a>
 284 and
 285 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">twelve</a>
 286 years ago, I measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian
 287 was</a>, first by analysing the desktop files in all packages in the
 288 archive, then by analysing the DEP-11 AppStream data set.  I guess it
 289 is time to repeat the measurement, only for unstable as last time:</p>
 290
 291 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
 292
 293 <pre>
 294   count MIME type
 295   ----- -----------------------
 296      63 image/png
 297      63 image/jpeg
 298      57 image/tiff
 299      54 image/gif
 300      51 image/bmp
 301      50 audio/mpeg
 302      48 text/plain
 303      42 audio/x-mp3
 304      40 application/ogg
 305      39 audio/x-wav
 306      39 audio/x-flac
 307      36 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
 308      35 audio/x-mpeg
 309      34 audio/x-mpegurl
 310      34 audio/ogg
 311      33 application/x-ogg
 312      32 audio/mp4
 313      31 audio/x-scpls
 314      31 application/pdf
 315      29 audio/x-ms-wma
 316 </pre>
 317
 318 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot:</p>
 319
 320 <pre>
 321 cat /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz | \
 322   zcat | awk '/^  - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | \
 323   uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
 324 </pre>
 325
 326 <p>It is nice to see that the same number of packages now support PNG
 327 and JPEG.  Last time JPEG had more support than PNG.  Most of the MIME
 328 types are known to me, but the 'audio/x-scpls' one I have no idea what
 329 represent, except it being an audio format.  To find the packages
 330 claiming support for this format, the appstreamcli command from the
 331 appstream package can be used:
 332
 333 <pre>
 334 % appstreamcli what-provides mediatype audio/x-scpls | grep Package: | sort -u
 335 Package: alsaplayer-common
 336 Package: amarok
 337 Package: audacious
 338 Package: brasero
 339 Package: celluloid
 340 Package: clapper
 341 Package: clementine
 342 Package: cynthiune.app
 343 Package: elisa
 344 Package: gtranscribe
 345 Package: kaffeine
 346 Package: kmplayer
 347 Package: kylin-burner
 348 Package: lollypop
 349 Package: mediaconch-gui
 350 Package: mediainfo-gui
 351 Package: mplayer-gui
 352 Package: mpv
 353 Package: mystiq
 354 Package: parlatype
 355 Package: parole
 356 Package: pragha
 357 Package: qmmp
 358 Package: rhythmbox
 359 Package: sayonara
 360 Package: shotcut
 361 Package: smplayer
 362 Package: soundconverter
 363 Package: strawberry
 364 Package: syncplay
 365 Package: vlc
 366 %
 367 </pre>
 368
 369 <p>Look like several video and auto tools understand the format.
 370 Similarly one can check out the number of packages supporting the STL
 371 format commonly used for 3D printing:</p>
 372
 373 <pre>
 374 % appstreamcli what-provides mediatype model/stl | grep Package: | sort -u
 375 Package: cura
 376 Package: freecad
 377 Package: open3d-viewer
 378 %
 379 </pre>
 380
 381 <p>How strange the
 382 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
 383 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">prusa-slicer</a>
 384 packages do not support STL.  Perhaps just missing package metadata?
 385 Luckily the amount of package metadata in Debian is getting better,
 386 and hopefully this way of locating relevant packages for any file
 387 format will be the preferred one soon.
 388
 389 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 390 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 391 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 392
 393       </div>
 394       <div class="tags">
 395
 396
 397         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 398
 399
 400       </div>
 401     </div>
 402     <div class="padding"></div>
 403
 404     <div class="entry">
 405       <div class="title">
 406         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_2025_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html">The 2025 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</a>
 407       </div>
 408       <div class="date">
 409         11th January 2025
 410       </div>
 411       <div class="body">
 412         <p><a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">The LinuxCNC project</a> is
 413 trotting along.  And I believe this great software system for
 414 numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma
 415 cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods, would do even
 416 better with more in-person developer gatherings, so we plan to
 417 organise such gathering this summer too.</p>
 418
 419 <p>This year we would like to invite to a small LinuxCNC and free
 420 software fabrication workshop/gathering in Norway this summer for the
 421 weekend starting July 4th 2025.  New this year is the slightly larger
 422 scope, and we invite people also outside the LinuxCNC community to
 423 join.  As earlier, we suggest to organize it as an
 424 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference">unconference</a>,
 425 where the participants create the program upon arrival.</p>
 426
 427 <p>The location is a metal workshop 15 minutes drive away from to the
 428 Gardermoen airport (OSL), where there is a lot of space and a hotel only
 429 5 minutes away by car. We plan to fire up the barbeque in the evenings.</p>
 430
 431 <p>Please let us know if you would like to join.  We track the list of
 432 participants on <a href="https://pad.efn.no/p/linuxcnc-2025-norway">a
 433 simple pad</a>, please add yourself there if you are interested in joining.</p>
 434
 435 <p><a href="https://www.nuugfoundation.no/">The NUUG Foundation</a> has on
 436 our request offered to handle any money involved with this gathering,
 437 in other words holding any sponsor funds and paying any bills.
 438 NUUG Foundation is a spinnoff from the NUUG member organisation here
 439 in Norway with long ties to the free software and open standards
 440 communities.</p>
 441
 442 <p>As usual we hope to find sponsors to pay for food, lodging and travel.</p>
 443
 444 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 445 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 446 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 447
 448       </div>
 449       <div class="tags">
 450
 451
 452         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>.
 453
 454
 455       </div>
 456     </div>
 457     <div class="padding"></div>
 458
 459     <div class="entry">
 460       <div class="title">
 461         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_0_18_after_ten_years.html">New lsdvd release 0.18 after ten years</a>
 462       </div>
 463       <div class="date">
 464         21st December 2024
 465       </div>
 466       <div class="body">
 467         <p>The rumors of the death of
 468 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/">the lsdvd project</a>
 469 is slightly exaggerated.  And the last few months, we have been
 470 working on fixing and improving it, culminating in a new release last
 471 night.  This is the list of changes in the new 0.18 release, as
 472 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/59108028/">announced
 473 on the project mailing list</a>:</p>
 474
 475 <ul>
 476
 477   <li>Simplified autoconf setup, dropped --enable-debug option.</li>
 478   <li>Improved video resolution reporting (<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/patches/8/">Fixes #8</a>).</li>
 479   <li>Applied patches fetched from BSDs (<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/patches/7/">Fixes #7</a>).</li>
 480   <li>Corrected Perl output (<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/patches/1/">Fixes #1</a>).</li>
 481   <li>Adjusted Pan and Scan entries to produce valid XML.</li>
 482   <li>Changed --help output from stderr to stdout.</li>
 483   <li>Corrected aspect ratio and audio format formatting.</li>
 484   <li>Avoid segfault when hitting a NULL pointer in the IFO structure.</li>
 485   <li>Change build rules to supress compiler flags, to make it easier to
 486    spot warnings.</li>
 487   <li>Set default DVD device based on OS (Linux, *BSD, Darwin)</li>
 488   <li>Added libdvdread DVDDiscID to output.</li>
 489   <li>Corrected typo in longest track value in XML format.</li>
 490   <li>Switched XML output to use libxml to avoid string encoding issues.</li>
 491   <li>Added simple build time test suite.</li>
 492   <li>Cleaned up language code handling and adding missing mapping for
 493    language codes 'nb' and 'nn'.</li>
 494   <li>Added JSON output support using -Oj.</li>
 495 </ul>
 496
 497 <p>The most exciting news to me is easy access to the DVDDiscID, which
 498 make it a lot easier to identify DVD duplicates across a large
 499 collection of DVDs.  During testing it has proved to be very effective
 500 ad identifying when DVDs in a DVD box (say all Star Wars movies) is
 501 identical to DVDs sold individually (like the same Star Wars movies
 502 packaged individually).</p>
 503
 504 <p>Because none of the current developers got access to do tarball
 505 releases on Sourceforge any more, the release is only available as
 506 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/0.18/tree/">a git
 507 tag</a> in the repository.  Lets hope it do not take ten years for the
 508 next release.  The project are discussing to move away from
 509 Sourceforge, but it has not yet concluded.</p>
 510
 511 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 512 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 513 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 514
 515       </div>
 516       <div class="tags">
 517
 518
 519         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 520
 521
 522       </div>
 523     </div>
 524     <div class="padding"></div>
 525
 526     <div class="entry">
 527       <div class="title">
 528         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/More_than_200_orphaned_Debian_packages_moved_to_git__216_to_go.html">More than 200 orphaned Debian packages moved to git, 216 to go</a>
 529       </div>
 530       <div class="date">
 531         11th July 2024
 532       </div>
 533       <div class="body">
 534         <p><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_to_move_orphaned_Debian_packages_to_git.html">In
 535 April</a>, I started migrating orphaned Debian packages without any
 536 version control system listed in debian/control to git.  This morning,
 537 my Debian QA page finally reached 200 QA packages migrated.  In
 538 reality there are a few more, as the packages uploaded by someone else
 539 after my initial upload have disappeared from my QA uploads list.  As
 540 I am running out of steam and will most likely focus on other parts of
 541 Debian moving forward, I hope someone else will find time to continue
 542 the migration to bring the number of orphaned packages without any
 543 version control system down to zero.  Here is the updated recipe if
 544 someone want to help out.</p>
 545
 546 <p>To locate packages to work on, the following one-liner can be used:</p>
 547
 548 <blockquote><pre>
 549 PGPASSWORD="udd-mirror" psql --port=5432 --host=udd-mirror.debian.net \
 550   --username=udd-mirror udd -c "select source from sources \
 551    where release = 'sid' and (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' \
 552    OR vcs_browser ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL \
 553    OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%' \
 554    order by random() limit 10;"
 555 </pre></blockquote>
 556
 557 <p>Pick a random package from the list and run the latest edition of
 558 the script
 559 <tt><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2024-07-11-debian-snap-to-salsa.sh">debian-snap-to-salsa</a></tt>
 560 with the package name as the argument to prepare a git repository with
 561 the existing packaging.  This will download old Debian packages from
 562 <tt>snapshot.debian.org</tt>.  Note that very recent uploads will not
 563 be included, so check out the package on <tt>tracker.debian.org</tt>.
 564 Next, run <tt>gbp buildpackage --git-ignore-new</tt> to verify that
 565 the package build as it should, and then visit
 566 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/debian/">https://salsa.debian.org/debian/</a>
 567 and make sure there is not already a git repository for the package
 568 there.  I also did <tt>git log -p debian/control</tt> and look for vcs
 569 entries to check if the package used to have a git repository on
 570 Alioth, and see if it can be a useful starting point moving forward.
 571 If all this check out, I created a new gitlab project below the Debian
 572 group on salsa, push the package source there and upload a new version.
 573 I tend to also ensure build hardening is enabled, if it prove to be
 574 easy, and check if I can easily fix any lintian issues or bug reports.
 575 If the process took more than 20 minutes, I dropped it and moved on to
 576 another package.</p>
 577
 578 <p>If I found patches in debian/patches/ that were not yet passed
 579 upstream, I would send an email to make sure upstream know about them.
 580 This has proved to be a valuable step, and caused several new releases
 581 for software that initially appeared abandoned. :)</p>
 582
 583 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 584 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 585 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 586
 587       </div>
 588       <div class="tags">
 589
 590
 591         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 592
 593
 594       </div>
 595     </div>
 596     <div class="padding"></div>
 597
 598     <div class="entry">
 599       <div class="title">
 600         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_notes_from_the_2024_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html">Some notes from the 2024 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</a>
 601       </div>
 602       <div class="date">
 603         10th July 2024
 604       </div>
 605       <div class="body">
 606         <p>The Norwegian <a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">The LinuxCNC</a>
 607 developer gathering 2024 is over.  It was a great and productive
 608 weekend, and I am sad that it is over.</p>
 609
 610 <p>Regular readers probably still remember what LinuxCNC is, but her
 611 is a quick summary for those that forgot?  LinuxCNC is a free software
 612 system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines,
 613 lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and
 614 hexapods.  It eats G-code and produce motor movement and other changes
 615 to the physical world, while reading sensor input.</p>
 616
 617 <p>I am not quite sure about the total head count, as not all people
 618 were present at the gathering the entire weekend, but I believe it was
 619 close to 10 people showing their faces at the gathering.  The "hard
 620 core" of the group, who stayed the entire weekend, were two from
 621 Norway, two from Germany and one from England.  I am happy with the
 622 outcome from the gathering.  We managed to wrap up a new stable
 623 LinuxCNC release 2.9.3 and even tested it on real hardware within
 624 minutes of the release.  The release notes for 2.9.3 are still being
 625 written, but should show up on on the project site in the next few
 626 days.  We managed to go through around twenty pull requests and merge
 627 then into either the stable release (2.9) or the development branch
 628 (master).  There are still around thirty pull requests left to
 629 process, so we are not out of work yet.  We even managed to
 630 fix/improve a slightly worn lathe, and experiment with running a
 631 mechanical clock using G-code.</p>
 632
 633 <p>The evening barbeque worked well both on Saturday and Sunday.  It
 634 is quite fun to light up a charcoal grill using compressed air.  Sadly
 635 the weather was not the best, so we stayed indoors most of the
 636 time.</p>
 637
 638 <p>This gathering was made possible partly with sponsoring from both
 639 <a href="https://www.redpill-linpro.com/">Redpill Linpro</a>,
 640 <a href="https://debian.org/">Debian</a> and
 641 <a href="https://nuugfoundation.no/">NUUG Foundation</a>, and we are
 642 most grateful for the support.  I would also like to thank the local
 643 school for lending us some furniture, and of course the rest of the
 644 members of the organizers team, Asle and Bosse, for their countless
 645 contributions.  The gathering was such success that we want to do it
 646 again next year.</p>
 647
 648 <p>We plan to organize the next Norwegian LinuxCNC developer gathering
 649 at the end of June next year, the weekend Friday 27th to Sunday 29th
 650 of June 2025.  I recommend you reserve the dates on your calendar
 651 today.  Other related communities are also welcome to join in, for
 652 example those working on systems like FreeCAD and opencamlib, as I am
 653 sure we have much in common and sharing experiences would be very
 654 useful to all involved.  We are of course looking for sponsors for
 655 this gathering already.  The total budget for this gathering was
 656 around NOK 25.000 (around EUR 2.300), so our needs are quite modest.
 657 Perhaps a machine or tools company would like to help out the free
 658 software manufacturing community by sponsoring food, lodging and
 659 transport for such gathering?</p>
 660
 661       </div>
 662       <div class="tags">
 663
 664
 665         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>.
 666
 667
 668       </div>
 669     </div>
 670     <div class="padding"></div>
 671
 672     <div class="entry">
 673       <div class="title">
 674         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_2024_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html">The 2024 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</a>
 675       </div>
 676       <div class="date">
 677         31st May 2024
 678       </div>
 679       <div class="body">
 680         <p><a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">The LinuxCNC project</a> is still
 681 going strong.  And I believe this great software system for numerical control of
 682 machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
 683 cutting machines, robots and hexapods, would do even better with more
 684 in-person developer gatherings, so we plan to organise such gathering
 685 this summer too.</p>
 686
 687 <p>The Norwegian LinuxCNC developer gathering take place the weekend
 688 Friday July 5th to 7th this year, and is open for everyone interested
 689 in contributing to LinuxCNC and free software manufacturing.  Up to
 690 date information about the gathering can be found in
 691 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/thread/123eaae0-f3b9-4170-a251-b7d608f1e974%40bofh.no/">the
 692 developer mailing list thread</a> where the gathering was announced.
 693 Thanks to the good people at
 694
 695 <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> as well as leftover money
 696 from last years gathering from
 697 <a href="https://www.redpill-linpro.com/">Redpill-Linpro</a> and
 698 <a href="https://www.nuugfoundation.no/no/">NUUG Foundation</a>, we
 699 have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and probably also shelter
 700 for the people traveling from afar to join us.  If you would like to
 701 join the gathering, get in touch and add your details on
 702 <a href="https://pad.efn.no/p/linuxcnc-2024-norway">the pad</a>.</p>
 703
 704 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 705 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 706 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 707
 708       </div>
 709       <div class="tags">
 710
 711
 712         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>.
 713
 714
 715       </div>
 716     </div>
 717     <div class="padding"></div>
 718
 719     <div class="entry">
 720       <div class="title">
 721         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/45_orphaned_Debian_packages_moved_to_git__391_to_go.html">45 orphaned Debian packages moved to git, 391 to go</a>
 722       </div>
 723       <div class="date">
 724         25th April 2024
 725       </div>
 726       <div class="body">
 727         <p>Nine days ago, I started migrating orphaned Debian packages with no
 728 version control system listed in debian/control of the source to git.
 729 At the time there were 438 such packages.  Now there are 391,
 730 according to the UDD.  In reality it is slightly less, as there is a
 731 delay between uploads and UDD updates.  In the nine days since, I have
 732 thus been able to work my way through ten percent of the packages.  I
 733 am starting to run out of steam, and hope someone else will also help
 734 brushing some dust of these packages.  Here is a recipe how to do it.
 735
 736 I start by picking a random package by querying the UDD for a list of
 737 10 random packages from the set of remaining packages:
 738
 739 <blockquote><pre>
 740 PGPASSWORD="udd-mirror" psql --port=5432 --host=udd-mirror.debian.net \
 741   --username=udd-mirror udd -c "select source from sources \
 742    where release = 'sid' and (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' \
 743    OR vcs_browser ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL \
 744    OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%' \
 745    order by random() limit 10;"
 746 </pre></blockquote>
 747
 748 <p>Next, I visit http://salsa.debian.org/debian and search for the
 749 package name, to ensure no git repository already exist.  If it does,
 750 I clone it and try to get it to an uploadable state, and add the Vcs-*
 751 entries in d/control to make the repository more widely known.  These
 752 packages are a minority, so I will not cover that use case here.</p>
 753
 754 <p>For packages without an existing git repository, I run the
 755 following script <tt>debian-snap-to-salsa</tt> to prepare a git
 756 repository with the existing packaging.</p>
 757
 758 <blockquote><pre>
 759 #!/bin/sh
 760 #
 761 # See also https://bugs.debian.org/804722#31
 762
 763 set -e
 764
 765 # Move to this Standards-Version.
 766 SV_LATEST=4.7.0
 767
 768 PKG="$1"
 769
 770 if [ -z "$PKG" ]; then
 771     echo "usage: $0 <pkgname>"
 772     exit 1
 773 fi
 774
 775 if [ -e "${PKG}-salsa" ]; then
 776     echo "error: ${PKG}-salsa already exist, aborting."
 777     exit 1
 778 fi
 779
 780 if [ -z "ALLOWFAILURE" ] ; then
 781     ALLOWFAILURE=false
 782 fi
 783
 784 # Fetch every snapshotted source package.  Manually loop until all
 785 # transfers succeed, as 'gbp import-dscs --debsnap' do not fail on
 786 # download failures.
 787 until debsnap --force -v $PKG || $ALLOWFAILURE ; do sleep 1; done
 788 mkdir ${PKG}-salsa; cd ${PKG}-salsa
 789 git init
 790
 791 # Specify branches to override any debian/gbp.conf file present in the
 792 # source package.
 793 gbp import-dscs  --debian-branch=master --upstream-branch=upstream \
 794     --pristine-tar ../source-$PKG/*.dsc
 795
 796 # Add Vcs pointing to Salsa Debian project (must be manually created
 797 # and pushed to).
 798 if ! grep -q ^Vcs- debian/control ; then
 799     awk "BEGIN { s=1 } /^\$/ { if (s==1) { print \"Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/$PKG\"; print \"Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/$PKG.git\" }; s=0 } { print }" < debian/control > debian/control.new && mv debian/control.new debian/control
 800     git commit -m "Updated vcs in d/control to Salsa." debian/control
 801 fi
 802
 803 # Tell gbp to enforce the use of pristine-tar.
 804 inifile +inifile debian/gbp.conf +create +section DEFAULT +key pristine-tar +value True
 805 git add debian/gbp.conf
 806 git commit -m "Added d/gbp.conf to enforce the use of pristine-tar." debian/gbp.conf
 807
 808 # Update to latest Standards-Version.
 809 SV="$(grep ^Standards-Version: debian/control|awk '{print $2}')"
 810 if [ $SV_LATEST != $SV ]; then
 811     sed -i "s/\(Standards-Version: \)\(.*\)/\1$SV_LATEST/" debian/control
 812     git commit -m "Updated Standards-Version from $SV to $SV_LATEST." debian/control
 813 fi
 814
 815 if grep -q pkg-config debian/control; then
 816     sed -i s/pkg-config/pkgconf/ debian/control
 817     git commit -m "Replaced obsolete pkg-config build dependency with pkgconf." debian/control
 818 fi
 819
 820 if grep -q libncurses5-dev debian/control; then
 821     sed -i s/libncurses5-dev/libncurses-dev/ debian/control
 822     git commit -m "Replaced obsolete libncurses5-dev build dependency with libncurses-dev." debian/control
 823 fi
 824 </pre></blockquote>
 825
 826 Some times the debsnap script fail to download some of the versions.
 827 In those cases I investigate, and if I decide the failing versions
 828 will not be missed, I call it using ALLOWFAILURE=true to ignore the
 829 problem and create the git repository anyway.</p>
 830
 831 <p>With the git repository in place, I do a test build (gbp
 832 buildpackage) to ensure the build is actually working.  If it does not
 833 I pick a different package, or if the build failure is trivial to fix,
 834 I fix it before continuing.  At this stage I revisit
 835 http://salsa.debian.org/debian and create the project under this group
 836 for the package.  I then follow the instructions to publish the local
 837 git repository.  Here is from a recent example:</p>
 838
 839 <blockquote><pre>
 840 git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:debian/perl-byacc.git
 841 git push --set-upstream origin master upstream pristine-tar
 842 git push --tags
 843 </pre></blockquote>
 844
 845 <p>With a working build, I have a look at the build rules if I want to
 846 remove some more dust.  I normally try to move to debhelper compat
 847 level 13, which involves removing debian/compat and modifying
 848 debian/control to build depend on debhelper-compat (=13).  I also test
 849 with 'Rules-Requires-Root: no' in debian/control and verify in
 850 debian/rules that hardening is enabled, and include all of these if
 851 the package still build.  If it fail to build with level 13, I try
 852 with 12, 11, 10 and so on until I find a level where it build, as I do
 853 not want to spend a lot of time fixing build issues.</p>
 854
 855 <p>Some times, when I feel inspired, I make sure debian/copyright is
 856 converted to the machine readable format, often by starting with
 857 'debhelper -cc' and then cleaning up the autogenerated content until
 858 it matches realities.  If I feel like it, I might also clean up
 859 non-dh-based debian/rules files to use the short style dh build
 860 rules.</p>
 861
 862 <p>Once I have removed all the dust I care to process for the package,
 863 I run 'gbp dch' to generate a debian/changelog entry based on the
 864 commits done so far, run 'dch -r' to switch from 'UNRELEASED' to
 865 'unstable' and get an editor to make sure the 'QA upload' marker is in
 866 place and that all long commit descriptions are wrapped into sensible
 867 lengths, run 'debcommit --release -a' to commit and tag the new
 868 debian/changelog entry, run 'debuild -S' to build a source only
 869 package, and 'dput ../perl-byacc_2.0-10_source.changes' to do the
 870 upload.  During the entire process, and many times per step, I run
 871 'debuild' to verify the changes done still work.  I also some times
 872 verify the set of built files using 'find debian' to see if I can spot
 873 any problems (like no file in usr/bin any more or empty package).  I
 874 also try to fix all lintian issues reported at the end of each
 875 'debuild' run.</p>
 876
 877 <p>If I find Debian specific patches, I try to ensure their metadata
 878 is fairly up to date and some times I even try to reach out to
 879 upstream, to make the upstream project aware of the patches.  Most of
 880 my emails bounce, so the success rate is low.  For projects with no
 881 Homepage entry in debian/control I try to track down one, and for
 882 packages with no debian/watch file I try to create one.  But at least
 883 for some of the packages I have been unable to find a functioning
 884 upstream, and must skip both of these.</p>
 885
 886 <p>If I could handle ten percent in nine days, twenty people could
 887 complete the rest in less then five days.  I use approximately twenty
 888 minutes per package, when I have twenty minutes spare time to spend.
 889 Perhaps you got twenty minutes to spare too?</p>
 890
 891 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 892 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 893 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 894
 895 <p><strong>Update 2024-05-04:</strong> There is
 896 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2024-05-04-debian-snap-to-salsa.sh">an
 897 updated edition of my migration script</a>, last updated
 898 2024-05-04.</p>
 899
 900       </div>
 901       <div class="tags">
 902
 903
 904         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 905
 906
 907       </div>
 908     </div>
 909     <div class="padding"></div>
 910
 911     <div class="entry">
 912       <div class="title">
 913         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_to_move_orphaned_Debian_packages_to_git.html">Time to move orphaned Debian packages to git</a>
 914       </div>
 915       <div class="date">
 916         14th April 2024
 917       </div>
 918       <div class="body">
 919         <p>There are several packages in Debian without a associated git
 920 repository with the packaging history.  This is unfortunate and it
 921 would be nice if more of these would do so.  Quote a lot of these are
 922 without a maintainer, ie listed as maintained by the
 923 '<a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=packages%40qa.debian.org">Debian
 924 QA Group</a>' place holder.  In fact, 438 packages have this property
 925 according to UDD (<tt>SELECT source FROM sources WHERE release = 'sid'
 926 AND (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' OR vcs_browser ilike
 927 '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND
 928 maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%';</tt>).  Such packages can
 929 be updated without much coordination by any Debian developer, as they
 930 are considered orphaned.</p>
 931
 932 <p>To try to improve the situation and reduce the number of packages
 933 without associated git repository, I started a few days ago to search
 934 out candiates and provide them with a git repository under the
 935 'debian' collaborative Salsa project.  I started with the packages
 936 pointing to obsolete Alioth git repositories, and am now working my
 937 way across the ones completely without git references.  In addition to
 938 updating the Vcs-* debian/control fields, I try to update
 939 Standards-Version, debhelper compat level, simplify d/rules, switch to
 940 Rules-Requires-Root: no and fix lintian issues reported.  I only
 941 implement those that are trivial to fix, to avoid spending too much
 942 time on each orphaned package.  So far my experience is that it take
 943 aproximately 20 minutes to convert a package without any git
 944 references, and a lot more for packages with existing git repositories
 945 incompatible with git-buildpackages.</p>
 946
 947 <p>So far I have converted 10 packages, and I will keep going until I
 948 run out of steam.  As should be clear from the numbers, there is
 949 enough packages remaining for more people to do the same without
 950 stepping on each others toes.  I find it useful to start by searching
 951 for a git repo already on salsa, as I find that some times a git repo
 952 has already been created, but no new version is uploaded to Debian
 953 yet.  In those cases I start with the existing git repository.  I
 954 convert to the git-buildpackage+pristine-tar workflow, and ensure a
 955 debian/gbp.conf file with "pristine-tar=True" is added early, to avoid
 956 uploading a orig.tar.gz with the wrong checksum by mistake.  Did that
 957 three times in the begin before I remembered my mistake.</p>
 958
 959 <p>So, if you are a Debian Developer and got some spare time, perhaps
 960 considering migrating some orphaned packages to git?</p>
 961
 962 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 963 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 964 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 965
 966       </div>
 967       <div class="tags">
 968
 969
 970         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 971
 972
 973       </div>
 974     </div>
 975     <div class="padding"></div>
 976
 977     <div class="entry">
 978       <div class="title">
 979         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_and_improved_sqlcipher_in_Debian_for_accessing_Signal_database.html">New and improved sqlcipher in Debian for accessing Signal database</a>
 980       </div>
 981       <div class="date">
 982         12th November 2023
 983       </div>
 984       <div class="body">
 985         <p>For a while now I wanted to have direct access to the
 986 <a href="https://signal.org/">Signal</a> database of messages and
 987 channels of my Desktop edition of Signal.  I prefer the enforced end
 988 to end encryption of Signal these days for my communication with
 989 friends and family, to increase the level of safety and privacy as
 990 well as raising the cost of the mass surveillance government and
 991 non-government entities practice these days.  In August I came across
 992 a nice
 993 <a href="https://www.yoranbrondsema.com/post/the-guide-to-extracting-statistics-from-your-signal-conversations/">recipe
 994 on how to use sqlcipher to extract statistics from the Signal
 995 database</a> explaining how to do this.  Unfortunately this did not
 996 work with the version of sqlcipher in Debian.  The
 997 <a href="http://tracker.debian.org/sqlcipher/">sqlcipher</a>
 998 package is a "fork" of the sqlite package with added support for
 999 encrypted databases.  Sadly the current Debian maintainer
1000 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/961598">announced more than three
1001 years ago that he did not have time to maintain sqlcipher</a>, so it
1002 seemed unlikely to be upgraded by the maintainer.  I was reluctant to
1003 take on the job myself, as I have very limited experience maintaining
1004 shared libraries in Debian.  After waiting and hoping for a few
1005 months, I gave up the last  week, and set out to update the package.  In
1006 the process I orphaned it to make it more obvious for the next person
1007 looking at it that the package need proper maintenance.</p>
1008
1009 <p>The version in Debian was around five years old, and quite a lot of
1010 changes had taken place upstream into the Debian maintenance git
1011 repository.  After spending a few days importing the new upstream
1012 versions, realising that upstream did not care much for SONAME
1013 versioning as I saw library symbols being both added and removed with
1014 minor version number changes to the project, I concluded that I had to
1015 do a SONAME bump of the library package to avoid surprising the
1016 reverse dependencies.  I even added a simple
1017 autopkgtest script to ensure the package work as intended.  Dug deep
1018 into the hole of learning shared library maintenance, I set out a few
1019 days ago to upload the new version to Debian experimental to see what
1020 the quality assurance framework in Debian had to say about the result.
1021 The feedback told me the pacakge was not too shabby, and yesterday I
1022 uploaded the latest version to Debian unstable.  It should enter
1023 testing today or tomorrow, perhaps delayed by
1024 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1055812">a small library
1025 transition</a>.</p>
1026
1027 <p>Armed with a new version of sqlcipher, I can now have a look at the
1028 SQL database in ~/.config/Signal/sql/db.sqlite.  First, one need to
1029 fetch the encryption key from the Signal configuration using this
1030 simple JSON extraction command:</p>
1031
1032 <pre>/usr/bin/jq -r '."key"' ~/.config/Signal/config.json</pre>
1033
1034 <p>Assuming the result from that command is 'secretkey', which is a
1035 hexadecimal number representing the key used to encrypt the database.
1036 Next, one can now connect to the database and inject the encryption
1037 key for access via SQL to fetch information from the database.  Here
1038 is an example dumping the database structure:</p>
1039
1040 <pre>
1041 % sqlcipher ~/.config/Signal/sql/db.sqlite
1042 sqlite> PRAGMA key = "x'secretkey'";
1043 sqlite> .schema
1044 CREATE TABLE sqlite_stat1(tbl,idx,stat);
1045 CREATE TABLE conversations(
1046       id STRING PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1047       json TEXT,
1048
1049       active_at INTEGER,
1050       type STRING,
1051       members TEXT,
1052       name TEXT,
1053       profileName TEXT
1054     , profileFamilyName TEXT, profileFullName TEXT, e164 TEXT, serviceId TEXT, groupId TEXT, profileLastFetchedAt INTEGER);
1055 CREATE TABLE identityKeys(
1056       id STRING PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1057       json TEXT
1058     );
1059 CREATE TABLE items(
1060       id STRING PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1061       json TEXT
1062     );
1063 CREATE TABLE sessions(
1064       id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
1065       conversationId TEXT,
1066       json TEXT
1067     , ourServiceId STRING, serviceId STRING);
1068 CREATE TABLE attachment_downloads(
1069     id STRING primary key,
1070     timestamp INTEGER,
1071     pending INTEGER,
1072     json TEXT
1073   );
1074 CREATE TABLE sticker_packs(
1075     id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
1076     key TEXT NOT NULL,
1077
1078     author STRING,
1079     coverStickerId INTEGER,
1080     createdAt INTEGER,
1081     downloadAttempts INTEGER,
1082     installedAt INTEGER,
1083     lastUsed INTEGER,
1084     status STRING,
1085     stickerCount INTEGER,
1086     title STRING
1087   , attemptedStatus STRING, position INTEGER DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL, storageID STRING, storageVersion INTEGER, storageUnknownFields BLOB, storageNeedsSync
1088       INTEGER DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL);
1089 CREATE TABLE stickers(
1090     id INTEGER NOT NULL,
1091     packId TEXT NOT NULL,
1092
1093     emoji STRING,
1094     height INTEGER,
1095     isCoverOnly INTEGER,
1096     lastUsed INTEGER,
1097     path STRING,
1098     width INTEGER,
1099
1100     PRIMARY KEY (id, packId),
1101     CONSTRAINT stickers_fk
1102       FOREIGN KEY (packId)
1103       REFERENCES sticker_packs(id)
1104       ON DELETE CASCADE
1105   );
1106 CREATE TABLE sticker_references(
1107     messageId STRING,
1108     packId TEXT,
1109     CONSTRAINT sticker_references_fk
1110       FOREIGN KEY(packId)
1111       REFERENCES sticker_packs(id)
1112       ON DELETE CASCADE
1113   );
1114 CREATE TABLE emojis(
1115     shortName TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
1116     lastUsage INTEGER
1117   );
1118 CREATE TABLE messages(
1119         rowid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1120         id STRING UNIQUE,
1121         json TEXT,
1122         readStatus INTEGER,
1123         expires_at INTEGER,
1124         sent_at INTEGER,
1125         schemaVersion INTEGER,
1126         conversationId STRING,
1127         received_at INTEGER,
1128         source STRING,
1129         hasAttachments INTEGER,
1130         hasFileAttachments INTEGER,
1131         hasVisualMediaAttachments INTEGER,
1132         expireTimer INTEGER,
1133         expirationStartTimestamp INTEGER,
1134         type STRING,
1135         body TEXT,
1136         messageTimer INTEGER,
1137         messageTimerStart INTEGER,
1138         messageTimerExpiresAt INTEGER,
1139         isErased INTEGER,
1140         isViewOnce INTEGER,
1141         sourceServiceId TEXT, serverGuid STRING NULL, sourceDevice INTEGER, storyId STRING, isStory INTEGER
1142         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (type IS 'story'), isChangeCreatedByUs INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, isTimerChangeFromSync INTEGER
1143         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1144           json_extract(json, '$.expirationTimerUpdate.fromSync') IS 1
1145         ), seenStatus NUMBER default 0, storyDistributionListId STRING, expiresAt INT
1146         GENERATED ALWAYS
1147         AS (ifnull(
1148           expirationStartTimestamp + (expireTimer * 1000),
1149           9007199254740991
1150         )), shouldAffectActivity INTEGER
1151         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1152           type IS NULL
1153           OR
1154           type NOT IN (
1155             'change-number-notification',
1156             'contact-removed-notification',
1157             'conversation-merge',
1158             'group-v1-migration',
1159             'keychange',
1160             'message-history-unsynced',
1161             'profile-change',
1162             'story',
1163             'universal-timer-notification',
1164             'verified-change'
1165           )
1166         ), shouldAffectPreview INTEGER
1167         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1168           type IS NULL
1169           OR
1170           type NOT IN (
1171             'change-number-notification',
1172             'contact-removed-notification',
1173             'conversation-merge',
1174             'group-v1-migration',
1175             'keychange',
1176             'message-history-unsynced',
1177             'profile-change',
1178             'story',
1179             'universal-timer-notification',
1180             'verified-change'
1181           )
1182         ), isUserInitiatedMessage INTEGER
1183         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1184           type IS NULL
1185           OR
1186           type NOT IN (
1187             'change-number-notification',
1188             'contact-removed-notification',
1189             'conversation-merge',
1190             'group-v1-migration',
1191             'group-v2-change',
1192             'keychange',
1193             'message-history-unsynced',
1194             'profile-change',
1195             'story',
1196             'universal-timer-notification',
1197             'verified-change'
1198           )
1199         ), mentionsMe INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, isGroupLeaveEvent INTEGER
1200         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1201           type IS 'group-v2-change' AND
1202           json_array_length(json_extract(json, '$.groupV2Change.details')) IS 1 AND
1203           json_extract(json, '$.groupV2Change.details[0].type') IS 'member-remove' AND
1204           json_extract(json, '$.groupV2Change.from') IS NOT NULL AND
1205           json_extract(json, '$.groupV2Change.from') IS json_extract(json, '$.groupV2Change.details[0].aci')
1206         ), isGroupLeaveEventFromOther INTEGER
1207         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1208           isGroupLeaveEvent IS 1
1209           AND
1210           isChangeCreatedByUs IS 0
1211         ), callId TEXT
1212         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (
1213           json_extract(json, '$.callId')
1214         ));
1215 CREATE TABLE sqlite_stat4(tbl,idx,neq,nlt,ndlt,sample);
1216 CREATE TABLE jobs(
1217         id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
1218         queueType TEXT STRING NOT NULL,
1219         timestamp INTEGER NOT NULL,
1220         data STRING TEXT
1221       );
1222 CREATE TABLE reactions(
1223         conversationId STRING,
1224         emoji STRING,
1225         fromId STRING,
1226         messageReceivedAt INTEGER,
1227         targetAuthorAci STRING,
1228         targetTimestamp INTEGER,
1229         unread INTEGER
1230       , messageId STRING);
1231 CREATE TABLE senderKeys(
1232         id TEXT PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
1233         senderId TEXT NOT NULL,
1234         distributionId TEXT NOT NULL,
1235         data BLOB NOT NULL,
1236         lastUpdatedDate NUMBER NOT NULL
1237       );
1238 CREATE TABLE unprocessed(
1239         id STRING PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1240         timestamp INTEGER,
1241         version INTEGER,
1242         attempts INTEGER,
1243         envelope TEXT,
1244         decrypted TEXT,
1245         source TEXT,
1246         serverTimestamp INTEGER,
1247         sourceServiceId STRING
1248       , serverGuid STRING NULL, sourceDevice INTEGER, receivedAtCounter INTEGER, urgent INTEGER, story INTEGER);
1249 CREATE TABLE sendLogPayloads(
1250         id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1251
1252         timestamp INTEGER NOT NULL,
1253         contentHint INTEGER NOT NULL,
1254         proto BLOB NOT NULL
1255       , urgent INTEGER, hasPniSignatureMessage INTEGER DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL);
1256 CREATE TABLE sendLogRecipients(
1257         payloadId INTEGER NOT NULL,
1258
1259         recipientServiceId STRING NOT NULL,
1260         deviceId INTEGER NOT NULL,
1261
1262         PRIMARY KEY (payloadId, recipientServiceId, deviceId),
1263
1264         CONSTRAINT sendLogRecipientsForeignKey
1265           FOREIGN KEY (payloadId)
1266           REFERENCES sendLogPayloads(id)
1267           ON DELETE CASCADE
1268       );
1269 CREATE TABLE sendLogMessageIds(
1270         payloadId INTEGER NOT NULL,
1271
1272         messageId STRING NOT NULL,
1273
1274         PRIMARY KEY (payloadId, messageId),
1275
1276         CONSTRAINT sendLogMessageIdsForeignKey
1277           FOREIGN KEY (payloadId)
1278           REFERENCES sendLogPayloads(id)
1279           ON DELETE CASCADE
1280       );
1281 CREATE TABLE preKeys(
1282         id STRING PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1283         json TEXT
1284       , ourServiceId NUMBER
1285         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (json_extract(json, '$.ourServiceId')));
1286 CREATE TABLE signedPreKeys(
1287         id STRING PRIMARY KEY ASC,
1288         json TEXT
1289       , ourServiceId NUMBER
1290         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (json_extract(json, '$.ourServiceId')));
1291 CREATE TABLE badges(
1292         id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
1293         category TEXT NOT NULL,
1294         name TEXT NOT NULL,
1295         descriptionTemplate TEXT NOT NULL
1296       );
1297 CREATE TABLE badgeImageFiles(
1298         badgeId TEXT REFERENCES badges(id)
1299           ON DELETE CASCADE
1300           ON UPDATE CASCADE,
1301         'order' INTEGER NOT NULL,
1302         url TEXT NOT NULL,
1303         localPath TEXT,
1304         theme TEXT NOT NULL
1305       );
1306 CREATE TABLE storyReads (
1307         authorId STRING NOT NULL,
1308         conversationId STRING NOT NULL,
1309         storyId STRING NOT NULL,
1310         storyReadDate NUMBER NOT NULL,
1311
1312         PRIMARY KEY (authorId, storyId)
1313       );
1314 CREATE TABLE storyDistributions(
1315         id STRING PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
1316         name TEXT,
1317
1318         senderKeyInfoJson STRING
1319       , deletedAtTimestamp INTEGER, allowsReplies INTEGER, isBlockList INTEGER, storageID STRING, storageVersion INTEGER, storageUnknownFields BLOB, storageNeedsSync INTEGER);
1320 CREATE TABLE storyDistributionMembers(
1321         listId STRING NOT NULL REFERENCES storyDistributions(id)
1322           ON DELETE CASCADE
1323           ON UPDATE CASCADE,
1324         serviceId STRING NOT NULL,
1325
1326         PRIMARY KEY (listId, serviceId)
1327       );
1328 CREATE TABLE uninstalled_sticker_packs (
1329         id STRING NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
1330         uninstalledAt NUMBER NOT NULL,
1331         storageID STRING,
1332         storageVersion NUMBER,
1333         storageUnknownFields BLOB,
1334         storageNeedsSync INTEGER NOT NULL
1335       );
1336 CREATE TABLE groupCallRingCancellations(
1337         ringId INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
1338         createdAt INTEGER NOT NULL
1339       );
1340 CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'messages_fts_data'(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, block BLOB);
1341 CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'messages_fts_idx'(segid, term, pgno, PRIMARY KEY(segid, term)) WITHOUT ROWID;
1342 CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'messages_fts_content'(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, c0);
1343 CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'messages_fts_docsize'(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, sz BLOB);
1344 CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'messages_fts_config'(k PRIMARY KEY, v) WITHOUT ROWID;
1345 CREATE TABLE edited_messages(
1346         messageId STRING REFERENCES messages(id)
1347           ON DELETE CASCADE,
1348         sentAt INTEGER,
1349         readStatus INTEGER
1350       , conversationId STRING);
1351 CREATE TABLE mentions (
1352         messageId REFERENCES messages(id) ON DELETE CASCADE,
1353         mentionAci STRING,
1354         start INTEGER,
1355         length INTEGER
1356       );
1357 CREATE TABLE kyberPreKeys(
1358         id STRING PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
1359         json TEXT NOT NULL, ourServiceId NUMBER
1360         GENERATED ALWAYS AS (json_extract(json, '$.ourServiceId')));
1361 CREATE TABLE callsHistory (
1362         callId TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
1363         peerId TEXT NOT NULL, -- conversation id (legacy) | uuid | groupId | roomId
1364         ringerId TEXT DEFAULT NULL, -- ringer uuid
1365         mode TEXT NOT NULL, -- enum "Direct" | "Group"
1366         type TEXT NOT NULL, -- enum "Audio" | "Video" | "Group"
1367         direction TEXT NOT NULL, -- enum "Incoming" | "Outgoing
1368         -- Direct: enum "Pending" | "Missed" | "Accepted" | "Deleted"
1369         -- Group: enum "GenericGroupCall" | "OutgoingRing" | "Ringing" | "Joined" | "Missed" | "Declined" | "Accepted" | "Deleted"
1370         status TEXT NOT NULL,
1371         timestamp INTEGER NOT NULL,
1372         UNIQUE (callId, peerId) ON CONFLICT FAIL
1373       );
1374 [ dropped all indexes to save space in this blog post ]
1375 CREATE TRIGGER messages_on_view_once_update AFTER UPDATE ON messages
1376       WHEN
1377         new.body IS NOT NULL AND new.isViewOnce = 1
1378       BEGIN
1379         DELETE FROM messages_fts WHERE rowid = old.rowid;
1380       END;
1381 CREATE TRIGGER messages_on_insert AFTER INSERT ON messages
1382       WHEN new.isViewOnce IS NOT 1 AND new.storyId IS NULL
1383       BEGIN
1384         INSERT INTO messages_fts
1385           (rowid, body)
1386         VALUES
1387           (new.rowid, new.body);
1388       END;
1389 CREATE TRIGGER messages_on_delete AFTER DELETE ON messages BEGIN
1390         DELETE FROM messages_fts WHERE rowid = old.rowid;
1391         DELETE FROM sendLogPayloads WHERE id IN (
1392           SELECT payloadId FROM sendLogMessageIds
1393           WHERE messageId = old.id
1394         );
1395         DELETE FROM reactions WHERE rowid IN (
1396           SELECT rowid FROM reactions
1397           WHERE messageId = old.id
1398         );
1399         DELETE FROM storyReads WHERE storyId = old.storyId;
1400       END;
1401 CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE messages_fts USING fts5(
1402         body,
1403         tokenize = 'signal_tokenizer'
1404       );
1405 CREATE TRIGGER messages_on_update AFTER UPDATE ON messages
1406       WHEN
1407         (new.body IS NULL OR old.body IS NOT new.body) AND
1408          new.isViewOnce IS NOT 1 AND new.storyId IS NULL
1409       BEGIN
1410         DELETE FROM messages_fts WHERE rowid = old.rowid;
1411         INSERT INTO messages_fts
1412           (rowid, body)
1413         VALUES
1414           (new.rowid, new.body);
1415       END;
1416 CREATE TRIGGER messages_on_insert_insert_mentions AFTER INSERT ON messages
1417       BEGIN
1418         INSERT INTO mentions (messageId, mentionAci, start, length)
1419
1420     SELECT messages.id, bodyRanges.value ->> 'mentionAci' as mentionAci,
1421       bodyRanges.value ->> 'start' as start,
1422       bodyRanges.value ->> 'length' as length
1423     FROM messages, json_each(messages.json ->> 'bodyRanges') as bodyRanges
1424     WHERE bodyRanges.value ->> 'mentionAci' IS NOT NULL
1425
1426         AND messages.id = new.id;
1427       END;
1428 CREATE TRIGGER messages_on_update_update_mentions AFTER UPDATE ON messages
1429       BEGIN
1430         DELETE FROM mentions WHERE messageId = new.id;
1431         INSERT INTO mentions (messageId, mentionAci, start, length)
1432
1433     SELECT messages.id, bodyRanges.value ->> 'mentionAci' as mentionAci,
1434       bodyRanges.value ->> 'start' as start,
1435       bodyRanges.value ->> 'length' as length
1436     FROM messages, json_each(messages.json ->> 'bodyRanges') as bodyRanges
1437     WHERE bodyRanges.value ->> 'mentionAci' IS NOT NULL
1438
1439         AND messages.id = new.id;
1440       END;
1441 sqlite>
1442 </pre>
1443
1444 <p>Finally I have the tool needed to inspect and process Signal
1445 messages that I need, without using the vendor provided client.  Now
1446 on to transforming it to a more useful format.</p>
1447
1448 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1449 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1450 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1451
1452       </div>
1453       <div class="tags">
1454
1455
1456         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1457
1458
1459       </div>
1460     </div>
1461     <div class="padding"></div>
1462
1463     <div class="entry">
1464       <div class="title">
1465         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_17.html">New chrpath release 0.17</a>
1466       </div>
1467       <div class="date">
1468         10th November 2023
1469       </div>
1470       <div class="body">
1471         <p>The chrpath package provide a simple command line tool to remove or
1472 modify the rpath or runpath of compiled ELF program.  It is almost 10
1473 years since I updated the code base, but I stumbled over the tool
1474 today, and decided it was time to move the code base from Subversion
1475 to git and find a new home for it, as the previous one (Debian Alioth)
1476 has been shut down.  I decided to go with
1477 <a href="https://codeberg.org/">Codeberg</a> this time, as it is my git
1478 service of choice these days, did a quick and dirty migration to git
1479 and updated the code with a few patches I found in the Debian bug
1480 tracker.  These are the release notes:</p>
1481
1482 <p>New in 0.17 released 2023-11-10:</p>
1483
1484 <ul>
1485 <li>Moved project to Codeberg, as Alioth is shut down.</li>
1486 <li>Add Solaris support (use &lt;sys/byteorder.h> instead of &lt;byteswap.h>).
1487    Patch from Rainer Orth.</li>
1488 <li>Added missing newline from printf() line.  Patch from Frank Dana.</li>
1489 <li>Corrected handling of multiple ELF sections. Patch from Frank Dana.</li>
1490 <li>Updated build rules for .deb.  Partly based on patch from djcj.</li>
1491 </ul>
1492
1493 <p>The latest edition is tagged and available from
1494 <a href="https://codeberg.org/pere/chrpath">https://codeberg.org/pere/chrpath</a>.
1495
1496 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1497 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1498 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1499
1500       </div>
1501       <div class="tags">
1502
1503
1504         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1505
1506
1507       </div>
1508     </div>
1509     <div class="padding"></div>
1510
1511     <div class="entry">
1512       <div class="title">
1513         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Test_framework_for_DocBook_processors___formatters.html">Test framework for DocBook processors / formatters</a>
1514       </div>
1515       <div class="date">
1516          5th November 2023
1517       </div>
1518       <div class="body">
1519         <p>All the books I have published so far has been using
1520 <a href="https://docbook.org/">DocBook</a> somewhere in the process.
1521 For the first book, the source format was DocBook, while for every
1522 later book it was an intermediate format used as the stepping stone to
1523 be able to present the same manuscript in several formats, on paper,
1524 as ebook in ePub format, as a HTML page and as a PDF file either for
1525 paper production or for Internet consumption.  This is made possible
1526 with a wide variety of free software tools with DocBook support in
1527 Debian.  The source format of later books have been docx via rst,
1528 Markdown, Filemaker and Asciidoc, and for all of these I was able to
1529 generate a suitable DocBook file for further processing using
1530 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pandoc">pandoc</a>,
1531 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/asciidoc">a2x</a> and
1532 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/asciidoctor">asciidoctor</a>,
1533 as well as rendering using
1534 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xmlto">xmlto</a>,
1535 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dbtoepub">dbtoepub</a>,
1536 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dblatex">dblatex</a>,
1537 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/docbook-xsl">docbook-xsl</a> and
1538 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fop">fop</a>.</p>
1539
1540 <p>Most of the <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/">books I
1541 have published</a> are translated books, with English as the source
1542 language.  The use of
1543 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/po4a">po4a</a> to
1544 handle translations using the gettext PO format has been a blessing,
1545 but publishing translated books had triggered the need to ensure the
1546 DocBook tools handle relevant languages correctly.  For every new
1547 language I have published, I had to submit patches dblatex, dbtoepub
1548 and docbook-xsl fixing incorrect language and country specific issues
1549 in the framework themselves.  Typically this has been missing keywords
1550 like 'figure' or sort ordering of index entries.  After a while it
1551 became tiresome to only discover issues like this by accident, and I
1552 decided to write a DocBook "test framework" exercising various
1553 features of DocBook and allowing me to see all features exercised for
1554 a given language.  It consist of a set of DocBook files, a version 4
1555 book, a version 5 book, a v4 book set, a v4 selection of problematic
1556 tables, one v4 testing sidefloat and finally one v4 testing a book of
1557 articles.  The DocBook files are accompanied with a set of build rules
1558 for building PDF using dblatex and docbook-xsl/fop, HTML using xmlto
1559 or docbook-xsl and epub using dbtoepub.  The result is a set of files
1560 visualizing footnotes, indexes, table of content list, figures,
1561 formulas and other DocBook features, allowing for a quick review on
1562 the completeness of the given locale settings.  To build with a
1563 different language setting, all one need to do is edit the lang= value
1564 in the .xml file to pick a different ISO 639 code value and run
1565 'make'.</p>
1566
1567 <p>The <a href="https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/">test framework
1568 source code</a> is available from Codeberg, and a generated set of
1569 presentations of the various examples is available as Codeberg static
1570 web pages at
1571 <a href="https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/">https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/</a>.
1572 Using this test framework I have been able to discover and report
1573 several bugs and missing features in various tools, and got a lot of
1574 them fixed.  For example I got Northern Sami keywords added to both
1575 docbook-xsl and dblatex, fixed several typos in Norwegian bokmål and
1576 Norwegian Nynorsk, support for non-ascii title IDs added to pandoc,
1577 Norwegian index sorting support fixed in xindy and initial Norwegian
1578 Bokmål support added to dblatex.  Some issues still remains, though.
1579 Default index sorting rules are still broken in several tools, so the
1580 Norwegian letters æ, ø and å are more often than not sorted properly
1581 in the book index.</p>
1582
1583 <p>The test framework recently received some more polish, as part of
1584 publishing my latest book.  This book contained a lot of fairly
1585 complex tables, which exposed bugs in some of the tools.  This made me
1586 add a new test file with various tables, as well as spend some time to
1587 brush up the build rules.  My goal is for the test framework to
1588 exercise all DocBook features to make it easier to see which features
1589 work with different processors, and hopefully get them all to support
1590 the full set of DocBook features.  Feel free to send patches to extend
1591 the test set, and test it with your favorite DocBook processor.
1592 Please visit these two URLs to learn more:</p>
1593
1594 <ul>
1595 <li><a href="https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/">https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/</a></li>
1596 <li><a href="https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/">https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/</a></li>
1597 </ul>
1598
1599 <p>If you want to learn more on Docbook and translations, I recommend
1600 having a look at the <a href="https://docbook.org/">the DocBook
1601 web site</a>,
1602 <a href="https://doccookbook.sourceforge.net/html/en/">the DoCookBook
1603 site<a/> and my earlier blog post on
1604 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">how
1605 the Skolelinux project process and translate documentation</a>,  a talk I gave earlier this year on
1606 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20230314-oversetting-og-publisering-av-b%c3%b8ker-med-fri-programvare/">how
1607 to translate and publish books using free software</a> (Norwegian
1608 only).</p>
1609
1610 <!--
1611
1612 https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/issues/205 (docbook-xsl: sme support)
1613 https://bugs.debian.org/968437 (xindy: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
1614 https://bugs.debian.org/856123 (pandoc: markdown to docbook with non-english titles)
1615 https://bugs.debian.org/864813 (dblatex: missing nb words)
1616 https://bugs.debian.org/756386 (dblatex: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
1617 https://bugs.debian.org/796871 (dbtoepub: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
1618 https://bugs.debian.org/792616 (dblatex: PDF metadata)
1619 https://bugs.debian.org/686908 (docbook-xsl: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
1620 https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=373747&aid=3556630&group_id=21935 (docbook-xsl: nb/nn support)
1621 https://bugs.debian.org/684391 (dblatex: initial nb support)
1622
1623 -->
1624
1625 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1626 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1627 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1628
1629       </div>
1630       <div class="tags">
1631
1632
1633         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1634
1635
1636       </div>
1637     </div>
1638     <div class="padding"></div>
1639
1640     <div class="entry">
1641       <div class="title">
1642         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html">What did I learn from OpenSnitch this summer?</a>
1643       </div>
1644       <div class="date">
1645         11th June 2023
1646       </div>
1647       <div class="body">
1648         <p>With yesterdays
1649 <a href="https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20230610">release of Debian
1650 12 Bookworm</a>, I am happy to know the
1651 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
1652 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> is available for a wider audience.
1653 I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised
1654 about some of the programs connecting to the Internet.  Some programs
1655 are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based
1656 clock adjusting system and Tor to reach other Tor clients, but others
1657 were more dubious.  For example, the KDE Window manager try to look up
1658 the host name in DNS, for no apparent reason, but if this lookup is
1659 blocked the KDE desktop get periodically stuck when I use it.  Another
1660 surprise was how much Firefox call home directly to mozilla.com,
1661 mozilla.net and googleapis.com, to mention a few, when I visit other
1662 web pages.  This direct connection happen even if I told Firefox to
1663 always use a proxy, and the proxy setting is ignored for this traffic.
1664 Other surprising connections come from audacity and dirmngr (I do not
1665 use Gnome).  It took some trial and error to get a good default set of
1666 permissions.  Without it, I would get popups asking for permissions at
1667 any time, also the most inconvenient ones where I am in the middle of
1668 a time sensitive gaming session.</p>
1669
1670 <p>I suspect some application developers should rethink when then need
1671 to use network connections or DNS lookups, and recommend testing
1672 OpenSnitch (only <tt>apt install opensnitch</tt> away in Debian
1673 Bookworm) to locate and report any surprising Internet connections on
1674 your desktop machine.</p>
1675
1676 <p>At the moment the upstream developer and Debian package maintainer
1677 is working on making the system more reliable in Debian, by enabling
1678 the eBPF kernel module to track processes and connections instead of
1679 depending in content in /proc/.  This should enter unstable fairly
1680 soon.</p>
1681
1682 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1683 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1684 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1685
1686 <p><strong>Update 2023-06-12</strong>: I got a tip about
1687 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues">a list of privacy
1688 issues in Free Software</a> and the
1689 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-privacy">#debian-privacy IRC
1690 channel</a> discussing these topics.</p>
1691
1692
1693       </div>
1694       <div class="tags">
1695
1696
1697         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
1698
1699
1700       </div>
1701     </div>
1702     <div class="padding"></div>
1703
1704     <div class="entry">
1705       <div class="title">
1706         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html">wmbusmeters, parse data from your utility meter - nice free software</a>
1707       </div>
1708       <div class="date">
1709         19th May 2023
1710       </div>
1711       <div class="body">
1712         <p>There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water,
1713 gas, electricity or heat distribution meters.  The
1714 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter-Bus">Meter-Bus standard
1715 (EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4)</a> provide a cross vendor way
1716 to talk to and collect meter data.  I ran into this standard when I
1717 wanted to monitor some heat distribution meters, and managed to find
1718 free software that could do the job.  The meters in question broadcast
1719 encrypted messages with meter information via radio, and the hardest
1720 part was to track down the encryption keys from the vendor.  With this
1721 in place I could set up a MQTT gateway to submit the meter data for
1722 graphing.</p>
1723
1724 <p>The free software systems in question,
1725 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rtl-wmbus">rtl-wmbus</a> to
1726 read the messages from a software defined radio, and
1727 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/wmbusmeters">wmbusmeters</a> to
1728 decrypt and decode the content of the messages, is working very well
1729 and allowe me to get frequent updates from my meters.  I got in touch
1730 with upstream last year to see if there was any interest in publishing
1731 the packages via Debian.  I was very happy to learn that Fredrik
1732 Öhrström volunteered to maintain the packages, and I have since
1733 assisted him in getting Debian package build rules in place as well as
1734 sponsoring the packages into the Debian archive.  Sadly we completed
1735 it too late for them to become part of the next stable Debian release
1736 (Bookworm).  The wmbusmeters package just cleared the NEW queue.  It
1737 will need some work to fix a built problem, but I expect Fredrik will
1738 find a solution soon.</p>
1739
1740 <p>If you got a infrastructure meter supporting the Meter Bus
1741 standard, I strongly recommend having a look at these nice
1742 packages.</p>
1743
1744 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1745 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1746 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1747
1748       </div>
1749       <div class="tags">
1750
1751
1752         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1753
1754
1755       </div>
1756     </div>
1757     <div class="padding"></div>
1758
1759     <div class="entry">
1760       <div class="title">
1761         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html">The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</a>
1762       </div>
1763       <div class="date">
1764         14th May 2023
1765       </div>
1766       <div class="body">
1767         <p>The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days.  A lot of
1768 patches and issues have seen activity on
1769 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/">the project github
1770 pages</a> recently.  A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering
1771 over at the <a href="https://tormach.com/">Tormach</a> headquarter in
1772 Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway.  If you
1773 wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:</p>
1774
1775 <blockquote>
1776 "LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
1777 machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
1778 cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
1779 joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
1780 several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
1781 interactive development)."
1782 </blockquote>
1783
1784 <p>The Norwegian developer gathering take place the weekend June 16th
1785 to 18th this year, and is open for everyone interested in contributing
1786 to LinuxCNC.  Up to date information about the gathering can be found
1787 in
1788 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/thread/sa64jp06nob.fsf%40hjemme.reinholdtsen.name/#msg37837251">the
1789 developer mailing list thread</a> where the gathering was announced.
1790 Thanks to the good people at
1791 <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>,
1792 <a href="https://www.redpill-linpro.com/">Redpill-Linpro</a> and
1793 <a href="https://www.nuugfoundation.no/no/">NUUG Foundation</a>, we
1794 have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and shelter for the people
1795 traveling from afar to join us.  If you would like to join the
1796 gathering, get in touch.</p>
1797
1798 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1799 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1800 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1801
1802       </div>
1803       <div class="tags">
1804
1805
1806         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>.
1807
1808
1809       </div>
1810     </div>
1811     <div class="padding"></div>
1812
1813     <div class="entry">
1814       <div class="title">
1815         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html">OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time</a>
1816       </div>
1817       <div class="date">
1818         13th May 2023
1819       </div>
1820       <div class="body">
1821         <p>A bit delayed,
1822 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
1823 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> package in Debian now got the
1824 latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm.  Because it depend on a
1825 package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the
1826 testing migration script did not understand that the tests were
1827 actually working, so the migration was delayed.  A bug in the package
1828 dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package
1829 (opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui)
1830 installed by default.  I am very grateful to Gustavo Iñiguez Goya for
1831 his work on getting the package ready for Debian Bookworm.</p>
1832
1833 <p>Armed with this package I have discovered some surprising
1834 connections from programs I believed were able to work completly
1835 offline, and it has already proven its worth, at least to me.  If you
1836 too want to get more familiar with the kind of programs using
1837 Internett connections on your machine, I recommend testing <tt>apt
1838 install opensnitch</tt> in Bookworm and see what you think.</p>
1839
1840 <p>The package is still not able to build its eBPF module within
1841 Debian.  Not sure how much work it would be to get it working, but
1842 suspect some kernel related packages need to be extended with more
1843 header files to get it working.</p>
1844
1845 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1846 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1847 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1848
1849       </div>
1850       <div class="tags">
1851
1852
1853         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
1854
1855
1856       </div>
1857     </div>
1858     <div class="padding"></div>
1859
1860     <div class="entry">
1861       <div class="title">
1862         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html">Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?</a>
1863       </div>
1864       <div class="date">
1865         23rd April 2023
1866       </div>
1867       <div class="body">
1868         <p>While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that
1869 it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with
1870 transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into
1871 stuff I need to write.  The background is that long drives often bring
1872 up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out
1873 of the question while driving.  With the release of
1874 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/">OpenAI Whisper</a>, this
1875 seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a
1876 go.  OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in
1877 audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that
1878 audio recording.  It handle multiple languages and according to its
1879 creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken
1880 one.  I have not tested the latter feature.  It can either use the CPU
1881 or a GPU with CUDA support.  As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice
1882 limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards.  I have few of those, as
1883 they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested
1884 the GPU option.  While looking into the matter, I did discover some
1885 work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with
1886 the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not
1887 spent much time looking into GPU support yet.  I've so far used an old
1888 X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its
1889 CPU.</p>
1890
1891 <p>As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers
1892 under control of someone else (aka a "cloud" service) to transcribe
1893 ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing
1894 system locally on my own computers.  The only sensible approach to me
1895 is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and
1896 to upload the needed packages into Debian.  Looking at Debian Bookworm, I
1897 discovered that only three packages were missing,
1898 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034307">tiktoken</a>,
1899 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034144">triton</a>, and
1900 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034091">openai-whisper</a>.  For a while
1901 I also believed
1902 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034286">ffmpeg-python</a> was
1903 needed, but as its
1904 <a href="https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/760">upstream
1905 seem to have vanished</a> I found it safer
1906 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1242">to rewrite
1907 whisper</a> to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python
1908 into Debian.  I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of
1909 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team">the Debian Deep
1910 Learning Team</a>, which seem like the best team to look after such
1911 packages.  Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware
1912 that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer
1913 versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after
1914 Bookworm is released.</p>
1915
1916 <p>All required code packages have been now waiting in
1917 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the Debian NEW
1918 queue</a> since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until
1919 Bookworm is released.  An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural
1920 network models used by Whisper.  The default behaviour of Whisper is
1921 to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to
1922 <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt> on first invocation.  This obviously would
1923 fail <a href="https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html">the
1924 deserted island test of free software</a> as the Debian packages would
1925 be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar
1926 powered computer on a deserted island.</p>
1927
1928 <p>Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian
1929 mirror system.  This is problematic, as the models are very large
1930 files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror
1931 infrastructure around the globe.  The strain would be even higher if
1932 the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do
1933 not.  The small model, which according to its creator is most useful
1934 for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there
1935 either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB).  The medium model, which to me
1936 seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB)
1937 and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB).  I would assume
1938 everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for
1939 highest quality.  I believe the models themselves would have to go
1940 into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really
1941 including any useful source code for updating the models.  The
1942 "source", aka the model training set, according to the creators
1943 consist of "680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised
1944 data collected from the web", which to me reads material with both
1945 unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public.  In other
1946 words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free
1947 Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free.</p>
1948
1949 <p>I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a
1950 model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it
1951 is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the
1952 archive.  In any case I wrote build rules for a
1953 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/openai-whisper-model">OpenAI
1954 Whisper model package</a> and
1955 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1257">modified the
1956 Whisper code base</a> to prefer shared files under <tt>/usr/</tt> and
1957 <tt>/var/</tt> over user specific files in <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt>
1958 to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such
1959 possibility.  One solution might be to include only one of the models
1960 (small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to
1961 download the others from the Internet.  Not quite sure what to do
1962 here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list).</p>
1963
1964 <p>To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to
1965 clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm.  I
1966 selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter
1967 would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are
1968 missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want
1969 to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running.</p>
1970
1971 <p>Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI
1972 Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation,
1973 first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys,
1974 then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages
1975 and one of the models:</p>
1976
1977 <p><pre>
1978 curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
1979   -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
1980 mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
1981 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list &lt;&lt;EOF
1982 deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
1983 deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
1984 EOF
1985 apt update
1986 apt install openai-whisper
1987 </pre></p>
1988
1989 <p>The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other
1990 computer than my own.  With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe
1991 a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small
1992 model.  This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM.  Transcribing
1993 the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes
1994 using around 5.2 GiB of RAM.  My test machine had too little memory to
1995 test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM.  In
1996 short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will
1997 for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian.</p>
1998
1999 <p>Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.</p>
2000
2001 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2002 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2003 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2004
2005       </div>
2006       <div class="tags">
2007
2008
2009         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2010
2011
2012       </div>
2013     </div>
2014     <div class="padding"></div>
2015
2016     <div class="entry">
2017       <div class="title">
2018         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html">rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux  - nice free software</a>
2019       </div>
2020       <div class="date">
2021          7th April 2023
2022       </div>
2023       <div class="body">
2024         <p>Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency
2025 scanner for my software defined radio.  Just for fun I tried to locate
2026 the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all
2027 the frequencies to see what is in use.  I've tried to find a useful
2028 program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful
2029 tool.  This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I
2030 found a description of
2031 <a href="https://www.kali.org/tools/rtlsdr-scanner/">rtlsdr-scanner
2032 over at the Kali site</a>, and was able to track down
2033 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/rtlsdr-scanner.git">the
2034 Kali package git repository</a> to build a deb package for the
2035 scanner.  Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself,
2036 at least in Debian Bullseye.  Two runtime dependencies,
2037 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-visvis.git">python-visvis</a>
2038 and
2039 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-rtlsdr.git">python-rtlsdr</a>
2040 had to be built and installed separately.  Luckily '<tt>gbp
2041 buildpackage</tt>' handled them just fine and no further packages had
2042 to be manually built.  The end result worked out of the box after
2043 installation.</p>
2044
2045 <p>My initial scans for FM channels worked just fine, so I knew the
2046 scanner was functioning.  But when I tried to scan every frequency
2047 from 100 to 1000 MHz, the program stopped unexpectedly near the
2048 completion.  After some debugging I discovered USB software radio I
2049 used rejected frequencies above 948 MHz, triggering a unreported
2050 exception breaking the scan.  Changing the scan to end at 957 worked
2051 better.  I similarly found the lower limit to be around 15, and ended
2052 up with the following full scan:</p>
2053
2054 <p><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png"><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png" width="100%"></a></p>
2055
2056 <p>Saving the scan did not work, but exporting it as a CSV file worked
2057 just fine.  I ended up with around 477k CVS lines with dB level for
2058 the given frequency.</p>
2059
2060 <p>The save failure seem to be a missing UTF-8 encoding issue in the
2061 python code.  Will see if I can find time to send a patch
2062 <a href="https://github.com/CdeMills/RTLSDR-Scanner/">upstream</a>
2063 later to fix this exception:</p>
2064
2065 <pre>
2066 Traceback (most recent call last):
2067   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
2068     save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
2069   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
2070     handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
2071 TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
2072 Traceback (most recent call last):
2073   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
2074     save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
2075   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
2076     handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
2077 TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
2078 </pre>
2079
2080 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2081 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2082 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2083
2084       </div>
2085       <div class="tags">
2086
2087
2088         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2089
2090
2091       </div>
2092     </div>
2093     <div class="padding"></div>
2094
2095     <div class="entry">
2096       <div class="title">
2097         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html">OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm</a>
2098       </div>
2099       <div class="date">
2100         25th February 2023
2101       </div>
2102       <div class="body">
2103         <p>Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo
2104 Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload,
2105 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
2106 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> is now available in Debian
2107 Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.</p>
2108
2109 <p>This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more
2110 machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will
2111 ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local
2112 network or the Internet.  If some background daemon is trying to dial
2113 home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by
2114 default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop
2115 up.  A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided
2116 in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs
2117 use the network.</p>
2118
2119 <p>OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I
2120 had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the
2121 package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick
2122 at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about
2123 week after the first upload.  It is now team maintained under the Go
2124 language team umbrella.  A few fixes to the default setup is only in
2125 Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week.</p>
2126
2127 <p>During testing I ran into an
2128 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/813">issue
2129 with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing</a>, which was quickly
2130 resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration
2131 change.  I've been told this was caused by the Debian packages default
2132 use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the
2133 newer eBPF module that can be used.  The reason is simply that
2134 upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for
2135 OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree,
2136 which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in
2137 Debian.  We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers
2138 package.  It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to
2139 build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full
2140 kernel source.</p>
2141
2142 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2143 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2144 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2145
2146       </div>
2147       <div class="tags">
2148
2149
2150         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
2151
2152
2153       </div>
2154     </div>
2155     <div class="padding"></div>
2156
2157     <div class="entry">
2158       <div class="title">
2159         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html">Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?</a>
2160       </div>
2161       <div class="date">
2162         29th January 2023
2163       </div>
2164       <div class="body">
2165         <p>Linux desktop systems
2166 <a href="https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html">have
2167 standardized</a> how programs present themselves to the desktop
2168 system.  If a package include a .desktop file in
2169 /usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop
2170 environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the
2171 menu of available programs in the system.  A lesser known fact is that
2172 a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the
2173 files created by the program in question, and use it to open these
2174 files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.</p>
2175
2176 <p>A while back I ran into a package that did not tell the desktop
2177 system how to recognize its files and was not used to open its files
2178 in the file browser and fixed it.  In the process I wrote a simple
2179 debian/tests/ script to ensure the setup keep working.  It might be
2180 useful for other packages too, to ensure any future version of the
2181 package keep handling its own files.</p>
2182
2183 <p>For this to work the file format need a useful MIME type that can
2184 be used to identify the format.  If the file format do not yet have a
2185 MIME type, it should define one and preferably also
2186 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">register
2187 it with IANA</a> to ensure the MIME type string is reserved.</p>
2188
2189 <p>The script uses the <tt>xdg-mime</tt> program from xdg-utils to
2190 query the database of standardized package information and ensure it
2191 return sensible values.  It also need the location of an example file
2192 for xdg-mime to guess the format of.</p>
2193
2194 <pre>
2195 #!/bin/sh
2196 #
2197 # Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
2198 # License: GPL v2 or later at your choice.
2199 #
2200 # Validate the MIME setup, making sure motor types have
2201 # application/vnd.openmotor+yaml associated with them and is connected
2202 # to the openmotor desktop file.
2203
2204 retval=0
2205
2206 mimetype="application/vnd.openmotor+yaml"
2207 testfile="test/data/real/o3100/motor.ric"
2208 mydesktopfile="openmotor.desktop"
2209
2210 filemime="$(xdg-mime query filetype "$testfile")"
2211
2212 if [ "$mimetype" != "$filemime" ] ; then
2213     retval=1
2214     echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file MIME type is $filemine, not $mimetype"
2215 else
2216     echo "success: xdg-mime report correct mime type $mimetype for motor file"
2217 fi
2218
2219 desktop=$(xdg-mime query default "$mimetype")
2220
2221 if [ "$mydesktopfile" != "$desktop" ]; then
2222     retval=1
2223     echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file should be handled by $desktop, not $mydesktopfile"
2224 else
2225     echo "success: xdg-mime agree motor file should be handled by $mydesktopfile"
2226 fi
2227
2228 exit $retval
2229 </pre>
2230
2231 <p>It is a simple way to ensure your users are not very surprised when
2232 they try to open one of your file formats in their file browser.</p>
2233
2234 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2235 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2236 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2237
2238       </div>
2239       <div class="tags">
2240
2241
2242         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2243
2244
2245       </div>
2246     </div>
2247     <div class="padding"></div>
2248
2249     <div class="entry">
2250       <div class="title">
2251         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Opensnitch__the_application_level_interactive_firewall__heading_into_the_Debian_archive.html">Opensnitch, the application level interactive firewall, heading into the Debian archive</a>
2252       </div>
2253       <div class="date">
2254         22nd January 2023
2255       </div>
2256       <div class="body">
2257         <p>While reading a
2258 <a href="https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/">blog
2259 post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and
2260 reporting information about them to Apple</a>, even on a machine where
2261 all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a
2262 description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X.  It seemed
2263 like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if
2264 something similar was available for Linux.</p>
2265
2266 <p>It did not take long to find
2267 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch">the OpenSnitch
2268 package</a>, which has been in development since 2017, and now is in
2269 version 1.5.0.  It has had a
2270 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/909567">request for Debian
2271 packaging</a> since 2018, but no-one completed the job so far.  Just
2272 for fun, I decided to see if I could help, and I was very happy to
2273 discover that
2274 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/304">upstream
2275 want a Debian package too</a>.</p>
2276
2277 <p>After struggling a bit with getting the program to run, figuring
2278 out building Go programs (and a little failed detour to look at eBPF
2279 builds too - help needed), I am very happy to report that I am
2280 sponsoring upstream to maintain the package in Debian, and it has
2281 since this morning been waiting in NEW for the ftpmasters to have a
2282 look.  Perhaps it can get into the archive in time for the Bookworm
2283 release?</p>
2284
2285 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2286 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2287 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2288
2289       </div>
2290       <div class="tags">
2291
2292
2293         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
2294
2295
2296       </div>
2297     </div>
2298     <div class="padding"></div>
2299
2300     <div class="entry">
2301       <div class="title">
2302         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/LinuxCNC_MQTT_publisher_component.html">LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component</a>
2303       </div>
2304       <div class="date">
2305          8th January 2023
2306       </div>
2307       <div class="body">
2308         <p>I watched <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jmKUV3aNLjk">a 2015
2309 video from Andreas Schiffler</a> the other day, where he set up
2310 <a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">LinuxCNC</a> to send status
2311 information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix.  As I also use MQTT for
2312 graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component
2313 would be useful and I set out to implement it.  Today I got the first
2314 draft limping along and submitted as
2315 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/2253">a patch to the
2316 LinuxCNC project</a>.</p>
2317
2318 <p>The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python.
2319 I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT
2320 broker, so I could reuse that code.  Writing a LinuxCNC component in
2321 Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code
2322 repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight
2323 forward.  The hardest part was creating a automated test for the
2324 component to ensure it was working.  Testing it in a simulated
2325 LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed
2326 that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to
2327 make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker
2328 available.</p>
2329
2330 <p>The draft is ready and working, but I am unsure which LinuxCNC HAL
2331 pins I should collect and publish by default (in other words, the
2332 default set of information pieces published), and how to get the
2333 machine name from the LinuxCNC INI file.  The latter is a minor
2334 detail, but I expect it would be useful in a setup with several
2335 machines available.  I am hoping for feedback from the experienced
2336 LinuxCNC developers and users, to make the component even better
2337 before it can go into the mainland LinuxCNC code base.</p>
2338
2339 <p>Since I started on the MQTT component, I came across
2340 <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Bqa2grG0XtA">another video from Kent
2341 VanderVelden</a> where he combine LinuxCNC with a set of screen glasses
2342 controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it occured to me that it would
2343 be useful for such use cases if LinuxCNC also provided a REST API for
2344 querying its status.  I hope to start on such component once the MQTT
2345 component is working well.</p>
2346
2347 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2348 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2349 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2350
2351       </div>
2352       <div class="tags">
2353
2354
2355         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2356
2357
2358       </div>
2359     </div>
2360     <div class="padding"></div>
2361
2362     <div class="entry">
2363       <div class="title">
2364         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/ONVIF_IP_camera_management_tool_finally_in_Debian.html">ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian</a>
2365       </div>
2366       <div class="date">
2367         24th December 2022
2368       </div>
2369       <div class="body">
2370         <p>Merry Christmas to you all.  Here is a small gift to all those with
2371 IP cameras following the <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">ONVIF
2372 specification</a>.  There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
2373 in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras.  After working with upstream for
2374 a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
2375 the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/libonvif">libonvif package</a>
2376 entered Debian Sid last night.</p>
2377
2378 <p>The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
2379 command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
2380 cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as
2381 preview the video from the camera.  Libonvif is available on Both
2382 Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library.  The main
2383 competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed.
2384 I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras
2385 using a free software system provided by Debian.  But the ONVIF world
2386 is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to
2387 follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration
2388 values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the
2389 time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while
2390 before it completely work with your camera.  Upstream seem eager to
2391 improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just <a
2392 href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">a bug report away</a>.</p>
2393
2394 <p>The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload
2395 before it can enter testing.  This will happen in the next few
2396 days.</p>
2397
2398 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2399 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2400 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2401
2402       </div>
2403       <div class="tags">
2404
2405
2406         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2407
2408
2409       </div>
2410     </div>
2411     <div class="padding"></div>
2412
2413     <div class="entry">
2414       <div class="title">
2415         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html">Managing and using ONVIF IP cameras with Linux</a>
2416       </div>
2417       <div class="date">
2418         19th October 2022
2419       </div>
2420       <div class="body">
2421         <p>Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data
2422 from a handful IP cameras using Linux.  I both wanted to change their
2423 settings and to make their imagery available via a free software
2424 service under my control.  Here is a summary of the tools I found.</p>
2425
2426 <p>First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols.  As far as
2427 I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their
2428 internal web server seem to only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer
2429 with some proprietary binary plugin, which in these days of course is
2430 a security disaster and also made it impossible for me to use the
2431 camera web interface.  Luckily I discovered that the SOAP looking
2432 protocol is actually following <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">the
2433 ONVIF specification</a>, which seem to be supported by a lot of IP
2434 cameras these days.</p>
2435
2436 <p>Once the protocol was identified, I was able to find what appear to
2437 be the most popular way to configure ONVIF cameras, the free software
2438 Windows tool named
2439 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/">ONVIF Device
2440 Manager</a>.  Lacking any other options at the time, I tried
2441 unsuccessfully to get it running using Wine, but was missing a dotnet
2442 40 library and I found no way around it to run it on Linux.</p>
2443
2444 <p>The next tool I found to configure the cameras were a non-free Linux Qt
2445 client <a href="https://www.lingodigit.com/onvif_nvcdemo.html">ONVIF
2446 Device Tool</a>.  I did not like its terms of use, so did not spend
2447 much time on it.</p>
2448
2449 <p>To collect the video and make it available in a web interface, I
2450 found the Zoneminder tool in Debian.  A recent version was able to
2451 automatically detect and configure ONVIF devices, so I could use it to
2452 set up motion detection in and collection of the camera output.  I had
2453 initial problems getting the ONVIF autodetection to work, as both
2454 Firefox and Chromium <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1001188">refused
2455 the inter-tab communication</a> being used by the Zoneminder web
2456 pages, but managed to get konqueror to work.  Apparently the "Enhanced
2457 Tracking Protection" in Firefox cause the problem.  I ended up
2458 upgrading to the Bookworm edition of Zoneminder in the process to try
2459 to fix the issue, and believe the problem might be solved now.</p>
2460
2461 <p>In the process I came across the nice Linux GUI tool
2462 <a href="https://gitlab.com/caspermeijn/onvifviewer/">ONVIF Viewer</a>
2463 allowing me to preview the camera output and validate the login
2464 passwords required.  Sadly its author has grown tired of maintaining
2465 the software, so it might not see any future updates.  Which is sad,
2466 as the viewer is sightly unstable and the picture tend to lock up.
2467 Note, this lockup might be due to limitations in the cameras and not
2468 the viewer implementation.  I suspect the camera is only able to
2469 provide pictures to one client at the time, and the Zoneminder feed
2470 might interfere with the GUI viewer.  I have
2471 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1000820">asked for the tool to be
2472 included in Debian</a>.</p>
2473
2474 <p>Finally, I found what appear to be very nice Linux free software
2475 replacement for the Windows tool, named
2476 <a href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">libonvif</a>.  It
2477 provide a C library to talk to ONVIF devices as well as a command line
2478 and GUI tool using the library.  Using the GUI tool I was able to change
2479 the admin passwords and update other settings of the cameras.  I have
2480 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1021980">asked for the package to be
2481 included in Debian</a>.</p>
2482
2483 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2484 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2485 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2486
2487 <p><strong>Update 2022-10-20</strong>: Since my initial publication of
2488 this text, I got several suggestions for more free software Linux
2489 tools.  There is <a href="https://github.com/quatanium/python-onvif">a
2490 ONVIF python library</a> (already
2491 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/824240">requested into Debian</a>) and
2492 <a href="https://github.com/FalkTannhaeuser/python-onvif-zeep">a python 3
2493 fork</a> using a different SOAP dependency.  There is also
2494 <a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onvif/">support for
2495 ONVIF in Home Assistant</a>, and there is an alternative to Zoneminder
2496 called <a href="https://www.shinobi.video/">Shinobi</a>.  The latter
2497 two are not included in Debian either.  I have not tested any of these
2498 so far.</p>
2499
2500       </div>
2501       <div class="tags">
2502
2503
2504         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2505
2506
2507       </div>
2508     </div>
2509     <div class="padding"></div>
2510
2511     <div class="entry">
2512       <div class="title">
2513         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
2514       </div>
2515       <div class="date">
2516         12th September 2022
2517       </div>
2518       <div class="body">
2519         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
2520
2521 <p>(The picture is of the previous edition.)</p>
2522
2523 <p>Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
2524 the "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
2525 Handbook</a>" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared.  The
2526 english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
2527 translations.  Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
2528 way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
2529 edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%.  The
2530 complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has
2531 been published in several languages over the years.  The translations
2532 are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue.  The
2533 last time I checked, it complete text was available in English,
2534 Norwegian Bokmål, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish.
2535 In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan,
2536 Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
2537 Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish,
2538 Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.</p>
2539
2540 <p>The translation is conducted on
2541 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2542 hosted weblate project page</a>.  Prospective translators are
2543 recommeded to subscribe to
2544 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2545 translators mailing list</a> and should also check out
2546 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2547 contributors</a>.</p>
2548
2549 <p>I am one of the Norwegian Bokmål translators of this book, and we
2550 have just started.  Your contribution is most welcome.</p>
2551
2552 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2553 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2554 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2555
2556       </div>
2557       <div class="tags">
2558
2559
2560         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2561
2562
2563       </div>
2564     </div>
2565     <div class="padding"></div>
2566
2567     <div class="entry">
2568       <div class="title">
2569         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html">Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?</a>
2570       </div>
2571       <div class="date">
2572         16th July 2022
2573       </div>
2574       <div class="body">
2575         <p>While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
2576 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>
2577 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller">PID
2578 controller</a>, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
2579 that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is.  It
2580 proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
2581 in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
2582 and Y to move accurately and reliably.  But while climbing up this
2583 rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
2584 systems are able to tune their PID controllers.  I got the impression
2585 from the documentation that LinuxCNC were not.  This proved to be not
2586 true.</p>
2587
2588 <p>The LinuxCNC
2589 <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/pid.9.html">pid
2590 component</a> is the recommended PID controller to use.  It uses eight
2591 constants <tt>Pgain</tt>, <tt>Igain</tt>, <tt>Dgain</tt>,
2592 <tt>bias</tt>, <tt>FF0</tt>, <tt>FF1</tt>, <tt>FF2</tt> and
2593 <tt>FF3</tt> to calculate the output value based on current and wanted
2594 state, and all of these need to have a sensible value for the
2595 controller to behave properly.  Note, there are even more values
2596 involved, theser are just the most important ones.  In my case I need
2597 the X, Y and Z axes to follow the requested path with little error.
2598 This has proved quite a challenge for someone who have never tuned a
2599 PID controller before, but there is at least some help to be found.
2600
2601 <p>I discovered that included in LinuxCNC was this old PID component
2602 at_pid claiming to have auto tuning capabilities.  Sadly it had been
2603 neglected since 2011, and could not be used as a plug in replacement
2604 for the default pid component.  One would have to rewriting the
2605 LinuxCNC HAL setup to test at_pid.  This was rather sad, when I wanted
2606 to quickly test auto tuning to see if it did a better job than me at
2607 figuring out good P, I and D values to use.</p>
2608
2609 <p>I decided to have a look if the situation could be improved.  This
2610 involved trying to understand the code and history of the pid and
2611 at_pid components.  Apparently they had a common ancestor, as code
2612 structure, comments and variable names were quite close to each other.
2613 Sadly this was not reflected in the git history, making it hard to
2614 figure out what really happened.  My guess is that the author of
2615 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/at_pid.c">at_pid.c</a>
2616 took a version of
2617 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/pid.c">pid.c</a>,
2618 rewrote it to follow the structure he wished pid.c to have, then added
2619 support for auto tuning and finally got it included into the LinuxCNC
2620 repository.  The restructuring and lack of early history made it
2621 harder to figure out which part of the code were relevant to the auto
2622 tuning, and which part of the code needed to be updated to work the
2623 same way as the current pid.c implementation.  I started by trying to
2624 isolate relevant changes in pid.c, and applying them to at_pid.c.  My
2625 aim was to make sure the at_pid component could replace the pid
2626 component with a simple change in the HAL setup loadrt line, without
2627 having to "rewire" the rest of the HAL configuration.  After a few
2628 hours following this approach, I had learned quite a lot about the
2629 code structure of both components, while concluding I was heading down
2630 the wrong rabbit hole, and should get back to the surface and find a
2631 different path.</p>
2632
2633 <p>For the second attempt, I decided to throw away all the PID control
2634 related part of the original at_pid.c, and instead isolate and lift
2635 the auto tuning part of the code and inject it into a copy of pid.c.
2636 This ensured compatibility with the current pid component, while
2637 adding auto tuning as a run time option.  To make it easier to identify
2638 the relevant parts in the future, I wrapped all the auto tuning code
2639 with '#ifdef AUTO_TUNER'.  The end result behave just like the current
2640 pid component by default, as that part of the code is identical.  The
2641 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/1820">end result
2642 entered the LinuxCNC master branch</a> a few days ago.</p>
2643
2644 <p>To enable auto tuning, one need to set a few HAL pins in the PID
2645 component.  The most important ones are <tt>tune-effort</tt>,
2646 <tt>tune-mode</tt> and <tt>tune-start</tt>.  But lets take a step
2647 back, and see what the auto tuning code will do.  I do not know the
2648 mathematical foundation of the at_pid algorithm, but from observation
2649 I can tell that the algorithm will, when enabled, produce a square
2650 wave pattern centered around the <tt>bias</tt> value on the output pin
2651 of the PID controller.  This can be seen using the HAL Scope provided
2652 by LinuxCNC.  In my case, this is translated into voltage (+-10V) sent
2653 to the motor controller, which in turn is translated into motor speed.
2654 So at_pid will ask the motor to move the axis back and forth.  The
2655 number of cycles in the pattern is controlled by the
2656 <tt>tune-cycles</tt> pin, and the extremes of the wave pattern is
2657 controlled by the <tt>tune-effort</tt> pin.  Of course, trying to
2658 change the direction of a physical object instantly (as in going
2659 directly from a positive voltage to the equivalent negative voltage)
2660 do not change velocity instantly, and it take some time for the object
2661 to slow down and move in the opposite direction.  This result in a
2662 more smooth movement wave form, as the axis in question were vibrating
2663 back and forth.  When the axis reached the target speed in the
2664 opposing direction, the auto tuner change direction again.  After
2665 several of these changes, the average time delay between the 'peaks'
2666 and 'valleys' of this movement graph is then used to calculate
2667 proposed values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain, and insert them into the
2668 HAL model to use by the pid controller.  The auto tuned settings are
2669 not great, but htye work a lot better than the values I had been able
2670 to cook up on my own, at least for the horizontal X and Y axis.  But I
2671 had to use very small <tt>tune-effort<tt> values, as my motor
2672 controllers error out if the voltage change too quickly.  I've been
2673 less lucky with the Z axis, which is moving a heavy object up and
2674 down, and seem to confuse the algorithm.  The Z axis movement became a
2675 lot better when I introduced a <tt>bias</tt> value to counter the
2676 gravitational drag, but I will have to work a lot more on the Z axis
2677 PID values.</p>
2678
2679 <p>Armed with this knowledge, it is time to look at how to do the
2680 tuning.  Lets say the HAL configuration in question load the PID
2681 component for X, Y and Z like this:</p>
2682
2683 <blockquote><pre>
2684 loadrt pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
2685 </pre></blockquote>
2686
2687 <p>Armed with the new and improved at_pid component, the new line will
2688 look like this:</p>
2689
2690 <blockquote><pre>
2691 loadrt at_pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
2692 </pre></blockquote>
2693
2694 <p>The rest of the HAL setup can stay the same.  This work because the
2695 components are referenced by name.  If the component had used count=3
2696 instead, all use of pid.# had to be changed to at_pid.#.</p>
2697
2698 <p>To start tuning the X axis, move the axis to the middle of its
2699 range, to make sure it do not hit anything when it start moving back
2700 and forth.  Next, set the <tt>tune-effort</tt> to a low number in the
2701 output range.  I used 0.1 as my initial value.  Next, assign 1 to the
2702 <tt>tune-mode</tt> value. Note, this will disable the pid controlling
2703 part and feed 0 to the output pin, which in my case initially caused a
2704 lot of drift.  In my case it proved to be a good idea with X and Y to
2705 tune the motor driver to make sure 0 voltage stopped the motor
2706 rotation.  On the other hand, for the Z axis this proved to be a bad
2707 idea, so it will depend on your setup.  It might help to set the
2708 <tt>bias</tt> value to a output value that reduce or eliminate the
2709 axis drift.  Finally, after setting <tt>tune-mode</tt>, set
2710 <tt>tune-start</tt> to 1 to activate the auto tuning.  If all go well,
2711 your axis will vibrate for a few seconds and when it is done, new
2712 values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain will be active.  To test them,
2713 change <tt>tune-mode</tt> back to 0.  Note that this might cause the
2714 machine to suddenly jerk as it bring the axis back to its commanded
2715 position, which it might have drifted away from during tuning.  To
2716 summarize with some halcmd lines:</p>
2717
2718 <blockquote><pre>
2719 setp pid.x.tune-effort 0.1
2720 setp pid.x.tune-mode 1
2721 setp pid.x.tune-start 1
2722 # wait for the tuning to complete
2723 setp pid.x.tune-mode 0
2724 </pre></blockquote>
2725
2726 <p>After doing this task quite a few times while trying to figure out
2727 how to properly tune the PID controllers on the machine in, I decided
2728 to figure out if this process could be automated, and wrote a script
2729 to do the entire tuning process from power on.  The end result will
2730 ensure the machine is powered on and ready to run, home all axis if it
2731 is not already done, check that the extra tuning pins are available,
2732 move the axis to its mid point, run the auto tuning and re-enable the
2733 pid controller when it is done.  It can be run several times.  Check
2734 out the
2735 <a href="https://github.com/SebKuzminsky/MazakVQC1540/blob/bon-dev/scripts/run-auto-pid-tuner">run-auto-pid-tuner</a>
2736 script on github if you want to learn how it is done.</p>
2737
2738 <p>My hope is that this little adventure can inspire someone who know
2739 more about motor PID controller tuning can implement even better
2740 algorithms for automatic PID tuning in LinuxCNC, making life easier
2741 for both me and all the others that want to use LinuxCNC but lack the
2742 in depth knowledge needed to tune PID controllers well.</p>
2743
2744 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2745 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2746 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2747
2748       </div>
2749       <div class="tags">
2750
2751
2752         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2753
2754
2755       </div>
2756     </div>
2757     <div class="padding"></div>
2758
2759     <div class="entry">
2760       <div class="title">
2761         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html">LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier</a>
2762       </div>
2763       <div class="date">
2764          3rd June 2022
2765       </div>
2766       <div class="body">
2767         <p>Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
2768 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a> system, I
2769 proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
2770 translators.  The original system consisted of independently written
2771 documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
2772 changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
2773 know how much was left to translated.  By using
2774 <a href="https://po4a.org/">the po4a system</a> to generate POT and PO
2775 files from the English documentation, this can be improved.  A small
2776 team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour
2777 finally payed off.  Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to
2778 translate <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/linuxcnc/">the
2779 LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate</a>, alongside the program itself.</p>
2780
2781 <p>The effort to migrate the documentation to use po4a has been both
2782 slow and frustrating.  I am very happy we finally made it.</p>
2783
2784 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2785 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2786 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2787
2788       </div>
2789       <div class="tags">
2790
2791
2792         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2793
2794
2795       </div>
2796     </div>
2797     <div class="padding"></div>
2798
2799     <div class="entry">
2800       <div class="title">
2801         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html">geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze</a>
2802       </div>
2803       <div class="date">
2804         20th April 2022
2805       </div>
2806       <div class="body">
2807         <p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
2808 located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
2809 not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
2810 information that I would like).  The
2811 <a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
2812 from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
2813 when all I got available is a USB memory stick.  I tried booting the
2814 ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work.  But genisoimage came to
2815 the rescue.</p>
2816
2817 <P>The geteltorito program in
2818 <a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
2819 package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
2820 USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
2821 to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
2822
2823 <blockquote><pre>
2824 geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
2825 sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
2826 </pre></blockquote>
2827
2828 <p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
2829 minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>
2830
2831       </div>
2832       <div class="tags">
2833
2834
2835         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2836
2837
2838       </div>
2839     </div>
2840     <div class="padding"></div>
2841
2842     <div class="entry">
2843       <div class="title">
2844         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html">Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?</a>
2845       </div>
2846       <div class="date">
2847          2nd March 2022
2848       </div>
2849       <div class="body">
2850         <p>After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
2851 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>, the
2852 system was accepted Sunday
2853 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linuxcnc">into Debian</a>.
2854 Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
2855 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=linuxcnc">its
2856 popularity-contest numbers</a> that people have been reporting its use
2857 since 2012.  <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/">Its project site</a> might
2858 be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
2859 via Tor.</p>
2860
2861 <p>But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering?  Perhaps a
2862 Wikipedia quote is in place?</p>
2863
2864 <blockquote>
2865 "LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
2866 machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
2867 cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
2868 joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
2869 several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
2870 interactive development)."
2871 </blockquote>
2872
2873 <p>It can even control 3D printers.  And even though the Wikipedia
2874 page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel
2875 features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features
2876 provided by the Debian kernel.
2877 <a href="https://github.com/linuxcnc/linuxcnc">The source code</a> is
2878 available from Github.  The last few months I've been involved in the
2879 translation setup for the program and documentation.  Translators are
2880 most welcome to
2881 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/linuxcnc/">join the
2882 effort</a> using Weblate.</p>
2883
2884 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2885 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2886 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2887
2888       </div>
2889       <div class="tags">
2890
2891
2892         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2893
2894
2895       </div>
2896     </div>
2897     <div class="padding"></div>
2898
2899     <div class="entry">
2900       <div class="title">
2901         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_still_an_excellent_choice_for_Lego_builders.html">Debian still an excellent choice for Lego builders</a>
2902       </div>
2903       <div class="date">
2904         24th October 2021
2905       </div>
2906       <div class="body">
2907         <p>The Debian Lego team saw a lot of activity the last few weeks.  All
2908 the packages under the team umbrella has been updated to fix
2909 packaging, lintian issues and BTS reports.  In addition, a new and
2910 inspiring team member appeared on both the
2911 <a href="https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-lego-team">debian-lego-team
2912 Team mailing list</a> and
2913 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC channel
2914 #debian-lego</a>.  If you are interested in Lego CAD design and LEGO
2915 Mindstorms programming, check out the
2916 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">team wiki page</a> to
2917 see what Debian can offer the Lego enthusiast.</p>
2918
2919 <p>Patches has been sent upstream, causing new upstream releases, one
2920 even the first one in more than ten years, and old upstreams was
2921 released with new ones.  There are still a lot of work left, and the
2922 team welcome more members to help us make sure Debian is the Linux
2923 distribution of choice for Lego builders.  If you want to contribute,
2924 join us in the IRC channel and become part of
2925 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/debian-lego-team/">the team on
2926 Salsa</a>.</p>
2927
2928 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2929 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2930 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2931
2932       </div>
2933       <div class="tags">
2934
2935
2936         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2937
2938
2939       </div>
2940     </div>
2941     <div class="padding"></div>
2942
2943     <div class="entry">
2944       <div class="title">
2945         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Six_complete_translations_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_for_Buster.html">Six complete translations of The Debian Administrator's Handbook for Buster</a>
2946       </div>
2947       <div class="date">
2948          5th July 2021
2949       </div>
2950       <div class="body">
2951         <p>I am happy observe that the <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The
2952 Debian Administrator's Handbook</a> is available in six languages now.
2953 I am not sure which one of these are completely proof read, but the
2954 complete book is available in these languages:
2955
2956 <ul>
2957
2958 <li>English</li>
2959 <li>Norwegian Bokmål</li>
2960 <li>German</li>
2961 <li>Indonesian</li>
2962 <li>Brazil Portuguese</li>
2963 <li>Spanish</li>
2964
2965 </ul>
2966
2967 <p>This is the list of languages more than 70% complete, in other
2968 words with not too much left to do:</p>
2969
2970 <ul>
2971
2972 <li>Chinese (Simplified) - 90%</li>
2973 <li>French - 79%</li>
2974 <li>Italian - 79%</li>
2975 <li>Japanese - 77%</li>
2976 <li>Arabic (Morocco) - 75%</li>
2977 <li>Persian - 71%</li>
2978
2979 </ul>
2980
2981 <p>I wonder how long it will take to bring these to 100%.</p>
2982
2983 <p>Then there is the list of languages about halfway done:</p>
2984
2985 <ul>
2986
2987 <li>Russian - 63%</li>
2988 <li>Swedish - 53%</li>
2989 <li>Chinese (Traditional) - 46%</li>
2990 <li>Catalan - 45%</li>
2991
2992 </ul>
2993
2994 <p>Several are on to a good start:</p>
2995
2996 <ul>
2997
2998 <li>Dutch - 26%</li>
2999 <li>Vietnamese - 25%</li>
3000 <li>Polish - 23%</li>
3001 <li>Czech - 22%</li>
3002 <li>Turkish - 18%</li>
3003
3004 </ul>
3005
3006 <p>Finally, there are the ones just getting started:</p>
3007
3008 <ul>
3009
3010 <li>Korean - 4%</li>
3011 <li>Croatian - 2%</li>
3012 <li>Greek - 2%</li>
3013 <li>Danish - 1%</li>
3014 <li>Romanian - 1%</li>
3015
3016 </ul>
3017
3018 <p>If you want to help provide a Debian instruction book in your own
3019 language, visit
3020 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/#languages">Weblate</a>
3021 to contribute to the translations.</p>
3022
3023 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3024 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3025 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3026
3027       </div>
3028       <div class="tags">
3029
3030
3031         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3032
3033
3034       </div>
3035     </div>
3036     <div class="padding"></div>
3037
3038     <div class="entry">
3039       <div class="title">
3040         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Latest_Jami_back_in_Debian_Testing__and_scriptable_using_dbus.html">Latest Jami back in Debian Testing, and scriptable using dbus</a>
3041       </div>
3042       <div class="date">
3043         12th January 2021
3044       </div>
3045       <div class="body">
3046         <p>After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and
3047 others, the decentralized communication platform
3048 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>
3049 (earlier known as Ring), managed to get
3050 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">its latest version</a>
3051 into Debian Testing.  Several of its dependencies has caused build and
3052 propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now.</p>
3053
3054 <p>In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how
3055 bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not
3056 connected to external IDs like phone numbers.  This allow me to set up
3057 computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find
3058 get a phone number for each computer.  Automatic notification via Jami
3059 is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus
3060 service).  Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any
3061 system send a message to any Jami address.  It will create a new
3062 identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist
3063 already:</p>
3064
3065 <p><pre>
3066 #!/bin/sh
3067 #
3068 # Usage: $0 <jami-address> <message>
3069 #
3070 # Send <message> to <jami-address>, create local jami account if
3071 # missing.
3072 #
3073 # License: GPL v2 or later at your choice
3074 # Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
3075
3076
3077 if [ -z "$HOME" ] ; then
3078     echo "error: missing \$HOME, required for dbus to work"
3079     exit 1
3080 fi
3081
3082 # First, get dbus running if not already running
3083 DBUSLAUNCH=/usr/bin/dbus-launch
3084 PIDFILE=/run/asterisk/dbus-session.pid
3085 if [ -e $PIDFILE ] ; then
3086     . $PIDFILE
3087     if ! kill -0 $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID 2>/dev/null ; then
3088         unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
3089     fi
3090 fi
3091 if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] && [ -x "$DBUSLAUNCH" ]; then
3092     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=$HOME/.dbus"
3093     dbus-daemon --session --address="$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" --nofork --nopidfile --syslog-only < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 &
3094     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$!
3095     (
3096         echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
3097         echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\""$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"\"
3098         echo export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
3099     ) > $PIDFILE
3100     . $PIDFILE
3101 fi &
3102
3103 dringop() {
3104     part="$1"; shift
3105     op="$1"; shift
3106     dbus-send --session \
3107         --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
3108 }
3109
3110 dringopreply() {
3111     part="$1"; shift
3112     op="$1"; shift
3113     dbus-send --session --print-reply \
3114         --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
3115 }
3116
3117 firstaccount() {
3118     dringopreply ConfigurationManager getAccountList | \
3119       grep string | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | head -n 1
3120 }
3121
3122 account=$(firstaccount)
3123
3124 if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
3125     echo "Missing local account, trying to create it"
3126     dringop ConfigurationManager addAccount \
3127       dict:string:string:"Account.type","RING","Account.videoEnabled","false"
3128     account=$(firstaccount)
3129     if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
3130         echo "unable to create local account"
3131         exit 1
3132     fi
3133 fi
3134
3135 # Not using dringopreply to ensure $2 can contain spaces
3136 dbus-send --print-reply --session \
3137   --dest=cx.ring.Ring \
3138   /cx/ring/Ring/ConfigurationManager \
3139   cx.ring.Ring.ConfigurationManager.sendTextMessage \
3140   string:"$account" string:"$1" \
3141   dict:string:string:"text/plain","$2"
3142 </pre></p>
3143
3144 <p>If you want to check it out yourself, visit the
3145 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system project page</a> to learn
3146 more, and install the latest Jami client from Debian Unstable or
3147 Testing.</p>
3148
3149 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3150 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3151 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3152
3153       </div>
3154       <div class="tags">
3155
3156
3157         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3158
3159
3160       </div>
3161     </div>
3162     <div class="padding"></div>
3163
3164     <div class="entry">
3165       <div class="title">
3166         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Buster_based_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Buster based Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
3167       </div>
3168       <div class="date">
3169         20th October 2020
3170       </div>
3171       <div class="body">
3172         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
3173
3174 <p>I am happy to report that we finally made it!  Norwegian Bokmål
3175 became the first translation published on paper of the new Buster
3176 based edition of "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
3177 Administrator's Handbook</a>".  The print proof reading copy arrived
3178 some days ago, and it looked good, so now the book is approved for
3179 general distribution.  This updated paperback edition <a
3180 href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available from
3181 lulu.com</a>.  The book is also available for download in electronic
3182 form as PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, and can also be
3183 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online</a>.</p>
3184
3185 <p>I am very happy to wrap up this Creative Common licensed project,
3186 which concludes several months of work by several volunteers. The
3187 number of Linux related books published in Norwegian are few, and I
3188 really hope this one will gain many readers, as it is packed with deep
3189 knowledge on Linux and the Debian ecosystem.  The book will be
3190 available for various Internet book stores like Amazon and Barnes &
3191 Noble soon, but I recommend buying
3192 "<a href="https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/roland-mas-and-rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-9j7qwq.html">Håndbok
3193 for Debian-administratoren</a>" directly from the source at Lulu.
3194
3195 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3196 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3197 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3198
3199       </div>
3200       <div class="tags">
3201
3202
3203         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3204
3205
3206       </div>
3207     </div>
3208     <div class="padding"></div>
3209
3210     <div class="entry">
3211       <div class="title">
3212         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Buster_update_of_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_almost_done.html">Buster update of Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook almost done</a>
3213       </div>
3214       <div class="date">
3215         11th September 2020
3216       </div>
3217       <div class="body">
3218         <p>Thanks to the good work of several volunteers, the updated edition
3219 of the Norwegian translation for
3220 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
3221 Handbook</a>" is now almost completed.  After many months of proof
3222 reading, I consider the proof reading complete enough for us to move
3223 to the next step, and have asked for the print version to be prepared
3224 and sent of to the print on demand service lulu.com.  While it is
3225 still not to late if you find any incorrect translations on
3226 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/nb_NO/debian-handbook/">the
3227 hosted Weblate service</a>, but it will be soon. :) You can check out
3228 <a href=" https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">the Buster
3229 edition on the web</a> until the print edition is ready.</p>
3230
3231 <p>The book will be for sale on lulu.com and various web book stores,
3232 with links available from the web site for the book linked to above.
3233 I hope a lot of readers find it useful.</p>
3234
3235 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3236 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3237 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3238
3239       </div>
3240       <div class="tags">
3241
3242
3243         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3244
3245
3246       </div>
3247     </div>
3248     <div class="padding"></div>
3249
3250     <div class="entry">
3251       <div class="title">
3252         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Working_on_updated_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Working on updated Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
3253       </div>
3254       <div class="date">
3255          4th July 2020
3256       </div>
3257       <div class="body">
3258         <p>Three years ago, the first Norwegian Bokmål edition of
3259 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
3260 Handbook</a>" was published.  This was based on Debian Jessie.  Now a
3261 new and updated version based on Buster is getting ready.  Work on the
3262 updated Norwegian Bokmål edition has been going on for a few months
3263 now, and yesterday, we reached the first mile stone, with 100% of the
3264 texts being translated.  A lot of proof reading remains, of course,
3265 but a major step towards a new edition has been taken.</p>
3266
3267 <p>The book is translated by volunteers, and we would love to get some
3268 help with the proof reading.  The translation uses
3269 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/nb_NO/debian-handbook/">the
3270 hosted Weblate service</a>, and we welcome everyone to have a look and
3271 submit improvements and suggestions.  There is also a proof readers
3272 PDF available on request, get in touch if you want to help out that
3273 way.</p>
3274
3275 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3276 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3277 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3278
3279       </div>
3280       <div class="tags">
3281
3282
3283         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3284
3285
3286       </div>
3287     </div>
3288     <div class="padding"></div>
3289
3290     <div class="entry">
3291       <div class="title">
3292         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Secure_Socket_API___a_simple_and_powerful_approach_for_TLS_support_in_software.html">Secure Socket API - a simple and powerful approach for TLS support in software</a>
3293       </div>
3294       <div class="date">
3295          6th June 2020
3296       </div>
3297       <div class="body">
3298         <p>As a member of the <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix
3299 User Group</a>, I have the pleasure of receiving the
3300 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a> magazine
3301 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/">;login:</a>
3302 several times a year.  I rarely have time to read all the articles,
3303 but try to at least skim through them all as there is a lot of nice
3304 knowledge passed on there.  I even carry the latest issue with me most
3305 of the time to try to get through all the articles when I have a few
3306 spare minutes.</p>
3307
3308 <p>The other day I came across a nice article titled
3309 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/winter2018/oneill">The
3310 Secure Socket API: TLS as an Operating System Service</a>" with a
3311 marvellous idea I hope can make it all the way into the POSIX standard.
3312 The idea is as simple as it is powerful.  By introducing a new
3313 socket() option IPPROTO_TLS to use TLS, and a system wide service to
3314 handle setting up TLS connections, one both make it trivial to add TLS
3315 support to any program currently using the POSIX socket API, and gain
3316 system wide control over certificates, TLS versions and encryption
3317 systems used.  Instead of doing this:</p>
3318
3319 <p><blockquote><pre>
3320 int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);
3321 </pre></blockquote></p>
3322
3323 <p>the program code would be doing this:<p>
3324
3325 <p><blockquote><pre>
3326 int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TLS);
3327 </pre></blockquote></p>
3328
3329 <p>According to the ;login: article, converting a C program to use TLS
3330 would normally modify only 5-10 lines in the code, which is amazing
3331 when compared to using for example the OpenSSL API.</p>
3332
3333 <p>The project has set up the
3334 <a href="https://securesocketapi.org/">https://securesocketapi.org/</a>
3335 web site to spread the idea, and the code for a kernel module and the
3336 associated system daemon is available from two github repositories:
3337 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa">ssa</a> and
3338 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa-daemon">ssa-daemon</a>.
3339 Unfortunately there is no explicit license information with the code,
3340 so its copyright status is unclear.  A
3341 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa/issues/2">request to solve
3342 this</a> about it has been unsolved since 2018-08-17.</p>
3343
3344 <p>I love the idea of extending socket() to gain TLS support, and
3345 understand why it is an advantage to implement this as a kernel module
3346 and system wide service daemon, but can not help to think that it
3347 would be a lot easier to get projects to move to this way of setting
3348 up TLS if it was done with a user space approach where programs
3349 wanting to use this API approach could just link with a wrapper
3350 library.</p>
3351
3352 <p>I recommend you check out this simple and powerful approach to more
3353 secure network connections. :)</p>
3354
3355 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3356 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3357 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3358
3359       </div>
3360       <div class="tags">
3361
3362
3363         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
3364
3365
3366       </div>
3367     </div>
3368     <div class="padding"></div>
3369
3370     <div class="entry">
3371       <div class="title">
3372         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Jami_as_a_Zoom_client__a_trick_for_password_protected_rooms___.html">Jami as a Zoom client, a trick for password protected rooms...</a>
3373       </div>
3374       <div class="date">
3375          8th May 2020
3376       </div>
3377       <div class="body">
3378         <p>Half a year ago,
3379 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">I
3380 wrote</a> about <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami communication
3381 client</a>, capable of peer-to-peer encrypted communication.  It
3382 handle both messages, audio and video.  It uses distributed hash
3383 tables instead of central infrastructure to connect its users to each
3384 other, which in my book is a plus.  I mentioned briefly that it could
3385 also work as a SIP client, which came in handy when the higher
3386 educational sector in Norway started to promote Zoom as its video
3387 conferencing solution.  I am reluctant to use the official Zoom client
3388 software, due to their <a href="https://zoom.us/terms">copyright
3389 license clauses</a> prohibiting users to reverse engineer (for example
3390 to check the security) and benchmark it, and thus prefer to connect to
3391 Zoom meetings with free software clients.</p>
3392
3393 <p>Jami worked OK as a SIP client to Zoom as long as there was no
3394 password set on the room.  The Jami daemon leak memory like crazy
3395 (approximately 1 GiB a minute) when I am connected to the video
3396 conference, so I had to restart the client every 7-10 minutes, which
3397 is not great.  I tried to get other SIP Linux clients to work
3398 without success, so I decided I would have to live with this wart
3399 until someone managed to fix the leak in the dring code base.  But
3400 another problem showed up once the rooms were password protected.  I
3401 could not get my dial tone signaling through from Jami to Zoom, and
3402 dial tone signaling is used to enter the password when connecting to
3403 Zoom.  I tried a lot of different permutations with my Jami and
3404 Asterisk setup to try to figure out why the signaling did not get
3405 through, only to finally discover that the fundamental problem seem to
3406 be that Zoom is simply not able to receive dial tone signaling when
3407 connecting via SIP.  There seem to be nothing wrong with the Jami and
3408 Asterisk end, it is simply broken in the Zoom end.  I got help from a
3409 very skilled VoIP engineer figuring out this last part.  And being a
3410 very skilled engineer, he was also able to locate a solution for me.
3411 Or to be exact, a workaround that solve my initial problem of
3412 connecting to password protected Zoom rooms using Jami.</p>
3413
3414 <p>So, how do you do this, I am sure you are wondering by now.  The
3415 trick is already
3416 <a href="https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/202405539-H-323-SIP-Room-Connector-Dial-Strings#sip">documented
3417 from Zoom</a>, and it is to modify the SIP address to include the room
3418 password.  What is most surprising about this is that the
3419 automatically generated email from Zoom with instructions on how to
3420 connect via SIP do not mention this.  The SIP address to use normally
3421 consist of the room ID (a number), an @ character and the IP address
3422 of the Zoom SIP gateway.  But Zoom understand a lot more than just the
3423 room ID in front of the at sign.  The format is "<tt>[Meeting
3424 ID].[Password].[Layout].[Host Key]</tt>", and you can here see how you
3425 can both enter password, control the layout (full screen, active
3426 presence and gallery) and specify the host key to start the meeting.
3427 The full SIP address entered into Jami to provide the password will
3428 then look like this (all using made up numbers):</p>
3429
3430 <p><blockquote>
3431 <tt>sip:657837644.522827@192.168.169.170</tt>
3432 </blockquote></p>
3433
3434 <p>Now if only jami would reduce its memory usage, I could even
3435 recommend this setup to others. :)</p>
3436
3437 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3438 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3439 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3440
3441       </div>
3442       <div class="tags">
3443
3444
3445         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3446
3447
3448       </div>
3449     </div>
3450     <div class="padding"></div>
3451
3452     <div class="entry">
3453       <div class="title">
3454         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/GnuCOBOL__a_free_platform_to_learn_and_use_COBOL___nice_free_software.html">GnuCOBOL, a free platform to learn and use COBOL - nice free software</a>
3455       </div>
3456       <div class="date">
3457         29th April 2020
3458       </div>
3459       <div class="body">
3460         <p>The curiosity got the better of me when
3461 <a href="https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/04/06/1424246/new-jersey-desperately-needs-cobol-programmers">Slashdot
3462 reported</a> that New Jersey was desperately looking for
3463 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL">COBOL</a> programmers,
3464 and a few days later it was reported that
3465 <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/ibm-rallies-cobol-engineers-to-save-overloaded-unemployment-systems-eeadf13eddce">IBM
3466 tried to locate COBOL programmers</a>.</p>
3467
3468 <p>I thus decided to have a look at free software alternatives to
3469 learn COBOL, and had the pleasure to find
3470 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/">GnuCOBOL</a> was
3471 already <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnucobol">in
3472 Debian</a>.  It used to be called Open Cobol, and is a "compiler"
3473 transforming COBOL code to C or C++ before giving it to GCC or Visual
3474 Studio to build binaries.</p>
3475
3476 <p>I managed to get in touch with upstream, and was impressed with the
3477 quick response, and also was happy to see a new Debian maintainer
3478 taking over when the original one recently asked to be replaced.  A
3479 new Debian upload was done as recently as yesterday.</p>
3480
3481 <p>Using the Debian package, I was able to follow a simple COBOL
3482 introduction and make and run simple COBOL programs.  It was fun to
3483 learn a new programming language.  If you want to test for yourself,
3484 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL">the GnuCOBOL Wikipedia
3485 page</a> have a few simple examples to get you startet.</p>
3486
3487 <p>As I do not have much experience with COBOL, I do not know how
3488 standard compliant it is, but it claim to pass most tests from COBOL
3489 test suite, which sound good to me.  It is nice to know it is possible
3490 to learn COBOL using software without any usage restrictions, and I am
3491 very happy such nice free software project as this is available.  If
3492 you as me is curious about COBOL, check it out.</p>
3493
3494 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3495 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3496 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3497
3498       </div>
3499       <div class="tags">
3500
3501
3502         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</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://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">Jami/Ring, finally functioning peer to peer communication client</a>
3512       </div>
3513       <div class="date">
3514         19th June 2019
3515       </div>
3516       <div class="body">
3517         <p>Some years ago, in 2016, I
3518 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">wrote
3519 for the first time about</a> the Ring peer to peer messaging system.
3520 It would provide messaging without any central server coordinating the
3521 system and without requiring all users to register a phone number or
3522 own a mobile phone.  Back then, I could not get it to work, and put it
3523 aside until it had seen more development.  A few days ago I decided to
3524 give it another try, and am happy to report that this time I am able
3525 to not only send and receive messages, but also place audio and video
3526 calls.  But only if UDP is not blocked into your network.</p>
3527
3528 <p>The Ring system changed name earlier this year to
3529 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>.  I
3530 tried doing web search for 'ring' when I discovered it for the first
3531 time, and can only applaud this change as it is impossible to find
3532 something called Ring among the noise of other uses of that word.  Now
3533 you can search for 'jami' and this client and
3534 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system</a> is the first hit at
3535 least on duckduckgo.</p>
3536
3537 <p>Jami will by default encrypt messages as well as audio and video
3538 calls, and try to send them directly between the communicating parties
3539 if possible.  If this proves impossible (for example if both ends are
3540 behind NAT), it will use a central SIP TURN server maintained by the
3541 Jami project.  Jami can also be a normal SIP client.  If the SIP
3542 server is unencrypted, the audio and video calls will also be
3543 unencrypted.  This is as far as I know the only case where Jami will
3544 do anything without encryption.</p>
3545
3546 <p>Jami is available for several platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOSX,
3547 Android, iOS, and Android TV.  It is included in Debian already.  Jami
3548 also work for those using F-Droid without any Google connections,
3549 while Signal do not.
3550 <a href="https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/technical/Protocol">The
3551 protocol</a> is described in the Ring project wiki.  The system uses a
3552 distributed hash table (DHT) system (similar to BitTorrent) running
3553 over UDP.  On one of the networks I use, I discovered Jami failed to
3554 work.  I tracked this down to the fact that incoming UDP packages
3555 going to ports 1-49999 were blocked, and the DHT would pick a random
3556 port and end up in the low range most of the time.  After talking to
3557 the developers, I solved this by enabling the dhtproxy in the
3558 settings, thus using TCP to talk to a central DHT proxy instead of
3559
3560 peering directly with others.  I've been told the developers are
3561 working on allowing DHT to use TCP to avoid this problem.  I also ran
3562 into a problem when trying to talk to the version of Ring included in
3563 Debian Stable (Stretch).  Apparently the protocol changed between
3564 beta2 and the current version, making these clients incompatible.
3565 Hopefully the protocol will not be made incompatible in the
3566 future.</p>
3567
3568 <p>It is worth noting that while looking at Jami and its features, I
3569 came across another communication platform I have not tested yet.  The
3570 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)">Tox protocol</a>
3571 and <a href="https://tox.chat/">family of Tox clients</a>.  It might
3572 become the topic of a future blog post.</p>
3573
3574 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3575 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3576 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3577
3578       </div>
3579       <div class="tags">
3580
3581
3582         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3583
3584
3585       </div>
3586     </div>
3587     <div class="padding"></div>
3588
3589     <div class="entry">
3590       <div class="title">
3591         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Strategispillet_Unknown_Horizons_n__tilgjengelig_p__bokm_l.html">Strategispillet Unknown Horizons nå tilgjengelig på bokmål</a>
3592       </div>
3593       <div class="date">
3594         23rd January 2019
3595       </div>
3596       <div class="body">
3597         <p>I høst ble jeg inspirert til å bidra til oversettelsen av
3598 <a href="http://unknown-horizons.org/">strategispillet Unknown
3599 Horizons</a>, og oversatte de nesten 200 strengene i prosjektet til
3600 bokmål.  Deretter har jeg gått å ventet på at det kom en ny utgave som
3601 inneholdt disse oversettelsene.  Nå er endelig ventetiden over.  Den
3602 nye versjonen kom på nyåret, og ble
3603 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/unknown-horizons">lastet opp i
3604 Debian</a> for noen få dager siden.  I går kveld fikk jeg testet det ut, og
3605 må innrømme at oversettelsene fungerer fint.  Fant noen få tekster som
3606 måtte justeres, men ikke noe alvorlig.  Har oppdatert
3607 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/">oversettelsen på
3608 Weblate</a>, slik at neste utgave vil være enda bedre. :)</p>
3609
3610 <p>Spillet er et ressursstyringsspill ala Civilization, og er morsomt
3611 å spille for oss som liker slikt. :)</p>
3612
3613 <p>Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
3614 det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
3615 til min adresse
3616 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.
3617 Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)</p>
3618
3619       </div>
3620       <div class="tags">
3621
3622
3623         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
3624
3625
3626       </div>
3627     </div>
3628     <div class="padding"></div>
3629
3630     <div class="entry">
3631       <div class="title">
3632         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html">Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit</a>
3633       </div>
3634       <div class="date">
3635         22nd January 2019
3636       </div>
3637       <div class="body">
3638         <p>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
3639 everything you need to program the <a href="https://microbit.org/">BBC
3640 micro:bit</a> is available from the Debian archive.  All this is
3641 thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
3642 packaging team.  The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
3643 program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
3644 machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
3645 into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.</p>
3646
3647 <p>There are three main pieces involved.  The first to enter Debian
3648 was
3649 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash">python-uflash</a>,
3650 which was accepted into the archive 2019-01-12.  The next one was
3651 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor">mu-editor</a>, which
3652 showed up 2019-01-13.  The final and hardest part to to into the
3653 archive was
3654 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython">firmware-microbit-micropython</a>,
3655 which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
3656 before it was accepted 2019-01-20.  The last one is already in Debian
3657 Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days.  This
3658 all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
3659 'apt install mu-editor' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
3660 Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
3661 catered for.</p>
3662
3663 <p>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
3664 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the isenkram
3665 package</a> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
3666 package.  This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
3667 get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
3668 the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.</p>
3669
3670 <p>This should make it easier to have fun.</p>
3671
3672 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3673 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3674 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3675
3676       </div>
3677       <div class="tags">
3678
3679
3680         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
3681
3682
3683       </div>
3684     </div>
3685     <div class="padding"></div>
3686
3687     <div class="entry">
3688       <div class="title">
3689         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html">Learn to program with Minetest on Debian</a>
3690       </div>
3691       <div class="date">
3692         15th December 2018
3693       </div>
3694       <div class="body">
3695         <p>A fun way to learn how to program
3696 <a href="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is to follow the
3697 instructions in the book
3698 "<a href="https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft">Learn to program
3699 with Minecraft</a>", which introduces programming in Python to people
3700 who like to play with Minecraft.  The book uses a Python library to
3701 talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
3702 providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
3703 The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
3704 Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
3705 Minecraft.  The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
3706 and Raspian.  But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
3707 recipes using the free software construction game
3708 <a href="https://minetest.net/">Minetest</a>.</p>
3709
3710 <p>There is <a href="https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod">a
3711 Minetest module implementing the same API</a>, making it possible to
3712 use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
3713 I
3714 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%2Bdfsg-1.html">uploaded
3715 this module</a> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
3716 FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
3717 Debian will be a simple 'apt install' away.  The Debian package is
3718 maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
3719 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft">the
3720 packaging rules</a> are currently located under 'unfinished' on
3721 Salsa.</p>
3722
3723 <p>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
3724 modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
3725 well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
3726 provided via modules in Minetest.  Without the required blocks, a
3727 simple stone block is used instead.  My initial testing with a analog
3728 clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
3729 instead used stone arms.</p>
3730
3731 <p>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
3732 Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes.  The
3733 <a href="https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/">recipes</a>
3734 I <a href="https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi">found</a> are only
3735 working with a standalone Minecraft server setup.  Are there any
3736 options to use with the normal desktop version?</p>
3737
3738 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3739 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3740 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3741
3742       </div>
3743       <div class="tags">
3744
3745
3746         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3747
3748
3749       </div>
3750     </div>
3751     <div class="padding"></div>
3752
3753     <div class="entry">
3754       <div class="title">
3755         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html">Time for an official MIME type for patches?</a>
3756       </div>
3757       <div class="date">
3758          1st November 2018
3759       </div>
3760       <div class="body">
3761         <p>As part of my involvement in
3762 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
3763 archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
3764 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
3765 go.  I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
3766 notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
3767 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
3768 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
3769 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
3770 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
3771 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
3772 official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF.  The output from
3773 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
3774 included in these emails.  At the moment people seem to use either
3775 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered.  It
3776 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
3777 everywhere.</p>
3778
3779 <p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
3780 up the topic on
3781 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
3782 media-types mailing list</a>.  If you are interested in discussion
3783 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
3784 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
3785 to join the discussion?</p>
3786
3787 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3788 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3789 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3790
3791       </div>
3792       <div class="tags">
3793
3794
3795         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
3796
3797
3798       </div>
3799     </div>
3800     <div class="padding"></div>
3801
3802     <div class="entry">
3803       <div class="title">
3804         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html">Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian</a>
3805       </div>
3806       <div class="date">
3807          4th October 2018
3808       </div>
3809       <div class="body">
3810         <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian.  To try to
3811 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
3812 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
3813 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
3814 <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
3815 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
3816 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
3817 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
3818
3819 <p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
3820 ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user.  Next, I
3821 created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
3822 to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
3823
3824 <p><blockquote><pre>
3825 [Desktop Entry]
3826 Name=Google drive autosync
3827 Type=Application
3828 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
3829 </pre></blockquote></p>
3830
3831 <p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
3832 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
3833
3834 <p><blockquote><pre>
3835 #!/bin/sh
3836 set -e
3837 cd ~/
3838 cleanup() {
3839     if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
3840         kill $syncpid
3841     fi
3842 }
3843 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
3844 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
3845 syncpdi=$!
3846 while true; do
3847     if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
3848         echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
3849         exit 1
3850     fi
3851     if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
3852         /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
3853     fi
3854     sleep 300
3855 done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
3856 </pre></blockquote></p>
3857
3858 <p>Feel free to use the setup if you want.  It can be assumed to be
3859 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
3860 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
3861
3862 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3863 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3864 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3865
3866       </div>
3867       <div class="tags">
3868
3869
3870         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3871
3872
3873       </div>
3874     </div>
3875     <div class="padding"></div>
3876
3877     <div class="entry">
3878       <div class="title">
3879         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
3880       </div>
3881       <div class="date">
3882          2nd September 2018
3883       </div>
3884       <div class="body">
3885         <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
3886 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
3887 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard.  After searching the
3888 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
3889 to find a recipe that worked.  If you got a kodi instance with its API
3890 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
3891 have check out a nice cover band.</p>
3892
3893 <p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
3894   --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
3895   "params": {"item": { "file":
3896   "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
3897   http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
3898
3899 <p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
3900 first argument.  It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
3901 and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi.  It is almost like a
3902 Chromecast. :)</p>
3903
3904 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3905 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3906 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3907
3908       </div>
3909       <div class="tags">
3910
3911
3912         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3913
3914
3915       </div>
3916     </div>
3917     <div class="padding"></div>
3918
3919     <div class="entry">
3920       <div class="title">
3921         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
3922       </div>
3923       <div class="date">
3924         31st July 2018
3925       </div>
3926       <div class="body">
3927         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
3928 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
3929 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
3930 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
3931 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
3932 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
3933 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
3934 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
3935 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
3936 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
3937 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
3938 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
3939 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
3940
3941 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
3942 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
3943 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
3944 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
3945 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
3946 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
3947 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
3948 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
3949 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
3950 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
3951 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
3952 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
3953 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
3954
3955 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
3956 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
3957 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
3958 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
3959 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
3960 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
3961 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
3962 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
3963 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
3964 seem to have the support I need.</p>
3965
3966 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
3967 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
3968 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
3969 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
3970
3971 <blockquote><pre>
3972 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
3973   -description='The RSS image description.' \
3974   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
3975 </pre></blockquote>
3976
3977 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
3978 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
3979 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
3980 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
3981 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
3982
3983 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
3984 suggestions.</p>
3985
3986 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3987 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3988 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3989
3990       </div>
3991       <div class="tags">
3992
3993
3994         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3995
3996
3997       </div>
3998     </div>
3999     <div class="padding"></div>
4000
4001     <div class="entry">
4002       <div class="title">
4003         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
4004       </div>
4005       <div class="date">
4006         12th July 2018
4007       </div>
4008       <div class="body">
4009         <p>Last night, I wrote
4010 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
4011 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
4012 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
4013 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
4014 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
4015 care of it all.</p>
4016
4017 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
4018 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
4019 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
4020 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
4021 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
4022 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
4023 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
4024 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
4025 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
4026 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
4027 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
4028 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
4029 I only care about the picture part.</p>
4030
4031 <blockquote><pre>
4032 #!/bin/sh
4033 #
4034 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
4035 # http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
4036 # for backgorund information.
4037
4038 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
4039 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
4040 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
4041 kodicmd() {
4042     host="$1"
4043     cmd="$2"
4044     params="$3"
4045     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
4046          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
4047          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
4048 }
4049 cleanup() {
4050     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
4051         # Stop the playing when we end
4052         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
4053                             jq .result[].playerid)
4054         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
4055     fi
4056     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
4057         kill "$gstpid"
4058     fi
4059 }
4060 trap cleanup EXIT INT
4061
4062 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
4063     kodihost=$1
4064     shift
4065 else
4066     kodihost=kodi.local
4067 fi
4068
4069 mcast=239.255.0.1
4070 mcastport=1234
4071 mcastttl=1
4072
4073 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
4074   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
4075 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
4076   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
4077   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
4078   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
4079   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
4080   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
4081   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
4082   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
4083 gstpid=$!
4084
4085 # Give stream a second to get going
4086 sleep 1
4087
4088 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
4089 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
4090         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
4091
4092 # wait for gst to end
4093 wait "$gstpid"
4094 </pre></blockquote>
4095
4096 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
4097
4098 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4099 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4100 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4101
4102       </div>
4103       <div class="tags">
4104
4105
4106         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4107
4108
4109       </div>
4110     </div>
4111     <div class="padding"></div>
4112
4113     <div class="entry">
4114       <div class="title">
4115         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
4116       </div>
4117       <div class="date">
4118         12th July 2018
4119       </div>
4120       <div class="body">
4121         <p>PS: See
4122 <ahref="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
4123 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
4124
4125 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
4126 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
4127 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
4128 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
4129 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
4130 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
4131
4132 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
4133 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
4134 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
4135 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
4136 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
4137 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
4138
4139 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
4140 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
4141 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
4142 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
4143 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
4144 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
4145
4146 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
4147 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
4148 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
4149 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
4150 the programs I work on.</p>
4151
4152 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
4153 rtp and rtsp recipes from
4154 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
4155 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
4156 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
4157
4158 <blockquote><pre>
4159 vlc screen:// --sout \
4160   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
4161 </pre></blockquote>
4162
4163 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
4164 same IP address:</p>
4165
4166 <blockquote><pre>
4167 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
4168   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
4169 </pre></blockquote>
4170
4171 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
4172 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
4173 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
4174 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
4175 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
4176 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
4177 big screen. :)</p>
4178
4179 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
4180 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
4181 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
4182 enough to tell.</p>
4183
4184 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
4185 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
4186 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
4187 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
4188 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
4189 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
4190 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
4191 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
4192 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
4193 the source end
4194
4195 <blockquote><pre>
4196 cvlc screen:// --sout \
4197   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
4198 </pre></blockquote>
4199
4200 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
4201
4202 <blockquote><pre>
4203 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
4204   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
4205 </pre></blockquote>
4206
4207 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
4208 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
4209 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
4210 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
4211 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
4212 difference.</p>
4213
4214 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
4215 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
4216 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
4217 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
4218 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
4219 multicast address on port 1234:
4220
4221 <blockquote><pre>
4222 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
4223   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
4224   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
4225   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
4226   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
4227   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
4228   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
4229     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
4230   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
4231 </pre></blockquote>
4232
4233 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
4234
4235 <blockquote><pre>
4236 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
4237   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
4238 </pre></blockquote>
4239
4240 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
4241 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
4242 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
4243 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
4244 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
4245 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
4246 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
4247
4248 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
4249 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
4250 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
4251 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
4252
4253 <blockquote><pre>
4254 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
4255 </pre></blockquote>
4256
4257 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4258 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4259 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4260
4261       </div>
4262       <div class="tags">
4263
4264
4265         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4266
4267
4268       </div>
4269     </div>
4270     <div class="padding"></div>
4271
4272     <div class="entry">
4273       <div class="title">
4274         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
4275       </div>
4276       <div class="date">
4277          9th July 2018
4278       </div>
4279       <div class="body">
4280         <p>Five years ago,
4281 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
4282 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
4283 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
4284 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
4285 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
4286 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
4287 unstable only this time:
4288
4289 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
4290
4291 <pre>
4292   count MIME type
4293   ----- -----------------------
4294      56 image/jpeg
4295      55 image/png
4296      49 image/tiff
4297      48 image/gif
4298      39 image/bmp
4299      38 text/plain
4300      37 audio/mpeg
4301      34 application/ogg
4302      33 audio/x-flac
4303      32 audio/x-mp3
4304      30 audio/x-wav
4305      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
4306      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
4307      27 inode/directory
4308      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
4309      27 audio/x-mpeg
4310      26 application/x-ogg
4311      25 audio/x-mpegurl
4312      25 audio/ogg
4313      24 text/html
4314 </pre>
4315
4316 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
4317 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
4318 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
4319
4320 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
4321 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
4322 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
4323 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
4324 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
4325 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
4326 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
4327 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
4328 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
4329 list like this:</p>
4330
4331 <p><blockquote><pre>
4332 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
4333 Package: anjuta
4334 Package: audacious
4335 Package: baobab
4336 Package: cervisia
4337 Package: chirp
4338 Package: dolphin
4339 Package: doublecmd-common
4340 Package: easytag
4341 Package: enlightenment
4342 Package: ephoto
4343 Package: filelight
4344 Package: gwenview
4345 Package: k4dirstat
4346 Package: kaffeine
4347 Package: kdesvn
4348 Package: kid3
4349 Package: kid3-qt
4350 Package: nautilus
4351 Package: nemo
4352 Package: pcmanfm
4353 Package: pcmanfm-qt
4354 Package: qweborf
4355 Package: ranger
4356 Package: sirikali
4357 Package: spacefm
4358 Package: spacefm
4359 Package: vifm
4360 %
4361 </pre></blockquote></p>
4362
4363 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
4364 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
4365
4366 <p><blockquote><pre>
4367 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
4368 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
4369 %
4370 </pre></blockquote></p>
4371
4372 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
4373 format:</p>
4374
4375 <p><blockquote><pre>
4376 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
4377 Package: cura
4378 Package: meshlab
4379 Package: printrun
4380 %
4381 </pre></blockquote></p>
4382
4383 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
4384
4385 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4386 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4387 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4388
4389       </div>
4390       <div class="tags">
4391
4392
4393         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4394
4395
4396       </div>
4397     </div>
4398     <div class="padding"></div>
4399
4400     <div class="entry">
4401       <div class="title">
4402         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
4403       </div>
4404       <div class="date">
4405          8th July 2018
4406       </div>
4407       <div class="body">
4408         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
4409 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
4410 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
4411 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
4412 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
4413 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
4414 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
4415 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
4416 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
4417 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
4418 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
4419
4420 <p><blockquote><pre>
4421 #!/bin/sh
4422 #
4423 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
4424 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
4425 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
4426 # flag for manual/automatic.
4427
4428 set -e
4429
4430 ignore() {
4431     if [ "$1" ]; then
4432         grep -v "$1"
4433     else
4434         cat
4435     fi
4436 }
4437
4438 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
4439     echo "Upgrading $p"
4440     apt clean
4441     apt install --download-only -y $p
4442     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
4443         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
4444             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
4445             break
4446         fi
4447     done
4448 done
4449 </pre></blockquote></p>
4450
4451 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
4452 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
4453 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
4454 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
4455 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
4456 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
4457 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
4458 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
4459 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
4460
4461 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
4462 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
4463 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
4464 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
4465 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
4466
4467 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
4468 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
4469 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
4470 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
4471 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
4472 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
4473 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
4474
4475 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4476 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4477 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4478
4479       </div>
4480       <div class="tags">
4481
4482
4483         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4484
4485
4486       </div>
4487     </div>
4488     <div class="padding"></div>
4489
4490     <div class="entry">
4491       <div class="title">
4492         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
4493       </div>
4494       <div class="date">
4495         13th February 2018
4496       </div>
4497       <div class="body">
4498         <p>A new version of the
4499 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
4500 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
4501 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
4502 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
4503 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
4504 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
4505 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
4506 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
4507 well.</p>
4508
4509 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
4510 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
4511 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
4512 in Debian.</p>
4513
4514 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4515 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4516 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4517
4518       </div>
4519       <div class="tags">
4520
4521
4522         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4523
4524
4525       </div>
4526     </div>
4527     <div class="padding"></div>
4528
4529     <div class="entry">
4530       <div class="title">
4531         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
4532       </div>
4533       <div class="date">
4534         17th December 2017
4535       </div>
4536       <div class="body">
4537         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
4538 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
4539 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
4540 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
4541 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
4542 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
4543 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
4544 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
4545 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
4546 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
4547 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
4548 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
4549 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
4550
4551 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
4552 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
4553 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
4554 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
4555 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
4556
4557 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
4558 team, flocking together on the
4559 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
4560 mailing list and the
4561 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
4562 IRC channel.</p>
4563
4564 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
4565 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
4566 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
4567
4568       </div>
4569       <div class="tags">
4570
4571
4572         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4573
4574
4575       </div>
4576     </div>
4577     <div class="padding"></div>
4578
4579     <div class="entry">
4580       <div class="title">
4581         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
4582       </div>
4583       <div class="date">
4584          9th October 2017
4585       </div>
4586       <div class="body">
4587         <p>At my nearby maker space,
4588 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
4589 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
4590 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
4591 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
4592 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
4593 as the software involved,
4594 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
4595 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
4596 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
4597 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
4598 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
4599 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
4600 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
4601
4602 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
4603 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
4604 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
4605 on
4606 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4607 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
4608
4609 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
4610 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
4611 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
4612 upstream version.</p>
4613
4614 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
4615 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
4616 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
4617 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
4618 Debian, check out
4619 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
4620 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
4621 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
4622
4623 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4624 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4625 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4626
4627       </div>
4628       <div class="tags">
4629
4630
4631         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4632
4633
4634       </div>
4635     </div>
4636     <div class="padding"></div>
4637
4638     <div class="entry">
4639       <div class="title">
4640         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
4641       </div>
4642       <div class="date">
4643         29th September 2017
4644       </div>
4645       <div class="body">
4646         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
4647 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
4648 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
4649 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
4650 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
4651 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
4652 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
4653 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
4654 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
4655 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
4656 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
4657 listen.</p>
4658
4659 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
4660 visualizing this information up and running for
4661 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
4662 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
4663 library.  The solution is based on the
4664 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
4665 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
4666 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
4667 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
4668 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
4669 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
4670 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
4671 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
4672
4673 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
4674 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
4675 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
4676 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
4677 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
4678 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
4679 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
4680 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
4681
4682 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
4683 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
4684 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
4685 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
4686 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
4687 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
4688 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
4689 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
4690 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
4691 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
4692 mentioned in
4693 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
4694 issue for the topic</a>.
4695
4696 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
4697
4698       </div>
4699       <div class="tags">
4700
4701
4702         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4703
4704
4705       </div>
4706     </div>
4707     <div class="padding"></div>
4708
4709     <div class="entry">
4710       <div class="title">
4711         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
4712       </div>
4713       <div class="date">
4714         24th September 2017
4715       </div>
4716       <div class="body">
4717         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
4718 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
4719 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
4720 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
4721 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
4722 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
4723 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
4724 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
4725 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
4726
4727 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
4728 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
4729 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
4730 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
4731
4732 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
4733 clone of two python scripts:</p>
4734
4735 <ol>
4736
4737 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
4738   testing).</li>
4739
4740 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
4741   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
4742
4743 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
4744   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
4745
4746 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
4747
4748 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
4749   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
4750   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
4751
4752 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
4753   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
4754
4755 </ol>
4756
4757 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
4758 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
4759 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
4760 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
4761 very cheaply
4762 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
4763 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
4764 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
4765
4766 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
4767 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
4768 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
4769 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
4770 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
4771 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
4772 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
4773 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
4774
4775 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
4776 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
4777 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
4778 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
4779 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
4780 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
4781 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
4782 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
4783 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
4784 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
4785 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
4786 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
4787
4788       </div>
4789       <div class="tags">
4790
4791
4792         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4793
4794
4795       </div>
4796     </div>
4797     <div class="padding"></div>
4798
4799     <div class="entry">
4800       <div class="title">
4801         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
4802       </div>
4803       <div class="date">
4804          9th August 2017
4805       </div>
4806       <div class="body">
4807         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
4808 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
4809 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
4810 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
4811 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
4812 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
4813 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
4814
4815 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
4816 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
4817 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
4818 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
4819 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
4820 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
4821 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
4822 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
4823 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
4824 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
4825 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
4826 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
4827 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
4828
4829 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
4830 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
4831 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
4832 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
4833 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
4834 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
4835 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
4836 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
4837 collector for a few days now.</p>
4838
4839 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
4840
4841 <ol>
4842
4843 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
4844
4845 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
4846 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
4847
4848 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
4849
4850 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
4851 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
4852 found a GSM station).</li>
4853
4854 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
4855
4856 </ol>
4857
4858 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
4859 running, I decided to package
4860 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
4861 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
4862 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
4863 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
4864 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
4865
4866 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
4867 commercial tools like
4868 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
4869 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
4870 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
4871 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
4872 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
4873 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
4874 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
4875 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
4876 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
4877 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
4878 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
4879 of government officials...</p>
4880
4881 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
4882 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
4883 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
4884 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
4885 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
4886 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
4887 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
4888 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
4889 one frequency?</p>
4890
4891       </div>
4892       <div class="tags">
4893
4894
4895         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4896
4897
4898       </div>
4899     </div>
4900     <div class="padding"></div>
4901
4902     <div class="entry">
4903       <div class="title">
4904         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
4905       </div>
4906       <div class="date">
4907         25th July 2017
4908       </div>
4909       <div class="body">
4910         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
4911
4912 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
4913 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
4914 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
4915 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
4916 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
4917 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
4918 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
4919 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
4920 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
4921 as a web page</a>.</p>
4922
4923 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
4924 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
4925 in
4926 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
4927 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
4928 and
4929 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
4930 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
4931 project.  I hope
4932 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
4933 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
4934
4935       </div>
4936       <div class="tags">
4937
4938
4939         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4940
4941
4942       </div>
4943     </div>
4944     <div class="padding"></div>
4945
4946     <div class="entry">
4947       <div class="title">
4948         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
4949       </div>
4950       <div class="date">
4951          3rd June 2017
4952       </div>
4953       <div class="body">
4954         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
4955 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
4956 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
4957 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
4958 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
4959 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
4960 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
4961
4962 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
4963
4964 <blockquote>
4965 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
4966 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
4967 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
4968
4969 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
4970 på temaet:</p>
4971 <ol>
4972 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
4973 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
4974 </ol>
4975
4976 </blockquote>
4977
4978 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
4979
4980 <blockquote>
4981 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
4982 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
4983 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
4984
4985 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
4986 temaet:</p>
4987
4988 <ol>
4989 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
4990 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
4991 </ol>
4992
4993 </blockquote>
4994
4995 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
4996 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
4997 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
4998 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
4999 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
5000 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
5001 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
5002
5003       </div>
5004       <div class="tags">
5005
5006
5007         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
5008
5009
5010       </div>
5011     </div>
5012     <div class="padding"></div>
5013
5014     <div class="entry">
5015       <div class="title">
5016         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
5017       </div>
5018       <div class="date">
5019          9th March 2017
5020       </div>
5021       <div class="body">
5022         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
5023 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
5024 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
5025 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
5026 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
5027 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
5028 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
5029 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
5030
5031 <p><blockquote>
5032 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
5033 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
5034 </blockquote></p>
5035
5036 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
5037 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
5038 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
5039 are noticed.</p>
5040
5041 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
5042 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
5043 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
5044 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
5045 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
5046 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
5047
5048 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
5049 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
5050 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
5051 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
5052 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
5053 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
5054
5055 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
5056
5057 <p><blockquote><pre>
5058 [...]
5059 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
5060 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
5061         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
5062         age:    7863311
5063         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
5064         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
5065         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
5066         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
5067         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
5068         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
5069         per-op statistics
5070                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5071              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
5072              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
5073               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
5074               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
5075             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
5076                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
5077                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
5078               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
5079                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
5080              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
5081                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
5082               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
5083                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
5084               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
5085                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
5086              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
5087          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
5088               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
5089               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
5090             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
5091               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5092
5093 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
5094 [...]
5095 </pre></blockquote></p>
5096
5097 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
5098 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
5099 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
5100 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
5101 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
5102 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
5103 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
5104 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
5105 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
5106 mount options.</p>
5107
5108 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
5109 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
5110 But according to
5111 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
5112 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
5113 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
5114 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
5115 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
5116 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
5117
5118 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
5119 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
5120 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
5121 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
5122 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
5123
5124       </div>
5125       <div class="tags">
5126
5127
5128         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
5129
5130
5131       </div>
5132     </div>
5133     <div class="padding"></div>
5134
5135     <div class="entry">
5136       <div class="title">
5137         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
5138       </div>
5139       <div class="date">
5140          3rd March 2017
5141       </div>
5142       <div class="body">
5143         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
5144 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
5145 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
5146 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
5147 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
5148 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
5149 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
5150 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
5151 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
5152
5153 <p><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
5154
5155 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
5156 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
5157 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
5158 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
5159 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
5160 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
5161 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
5162 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
5163
5164       </div>
5165       <div class="tags">
5166
5167
5168         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5169
5170
5171       </div>
5172     </div>
5173     <div class="padding"></div>
5174
5175     <div class="entry">
5176       <div class="title">
5177         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
5178       </div>
5179       <div class="date">
5180          1st March 2017
5181       </div>
5182       <div class="body">
5183         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
5184 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
5185 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
5186 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
5187 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
5188 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
5189 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
5190 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
5191 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
5192 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
5193 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
5194
5195 <blockquote><pre>
5196 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5197   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
5198   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
5199      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5200      sleep 1; \
5201   done
5202 300
5203 0+1 oppføringer inn
5204 0+1 oppføringer ut
5205 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
5206 4
5207 8
5208 12
5209 17
5210 21
5211 %
5212 </pre></blockquote>
5213
5214 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
5215 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
5216 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
5217 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
5218
5219 <blockquote><pre>
5220 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5221   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
5222   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
5223      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
5224      sleep 1; \
5225   done
5226 1079
5227 0+1 oppføringer inn
5228 0+1 oppføringer ut
5229 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
5230 433
5231 1028
5232 1031
5233 1035
5234 1038
5235 %
5236 </pre></blockquote>
5237
5238 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
5239 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
5240
5241 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
5242 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
5243 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
5244 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
5245 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
5246 post.</p>
5247
5248       </div>
5249       <div class="tags">
5250
5251
5252         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5253
5254
5255       </div>
5256     </div>
5257     <div class="padding"></div>
5258
5259     <div class="entry">
5260       <div class="title">
5261         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
5262       </div>
5263       <div class="date">
5264          9th January 2017
5265       </div>
5266       <div class="body">
5267         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
5268 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
5269 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
5270 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
5271 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
5272 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
5273 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
5274 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
5275 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
5276 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
5277 this:
5278
5279 <p><pre>
5280 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
5281  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
5282  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
5283  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
5284  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
5285  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
5286  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
5287  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
5288  8  * * *
5289  9  * * *
5290 [...]
5291 </pre></p>
5292
5293 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
5294 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
5295 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
5296 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
5297 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
5298 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
5299 traceroute request.</p>
5300
5301 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
5302 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
5303 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
5304 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
5305 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
5306
5307 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
5308 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
5309 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
5310 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
5311 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
5312 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
5313 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
5314 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
5315 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
5316
5317 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
5318 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
5319 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
5320 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
5321 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
5322 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
5323 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
5324 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
5325 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
5326 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
5327 render the page (in HAR format using
5328 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
5329 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
5330 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
5331 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
5332 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
5333
5334 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
5335 src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
5336
5337 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
5338 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
5339 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
5340 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
5341 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
5342 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
5343 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
5344 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
5345 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
5346 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
5347 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
5348 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
5349 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
5350 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
5351
5352 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
5353 src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
5354
5355 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
5356 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
5357 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
5358 question.
5359 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
5360 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
5361 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
5362 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
5363 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
5364 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
5365 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
5366
5367 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
5368 src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
5369
5370 <p>In the process, I came across the
5371 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
5372 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
5373 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
5374 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
5375 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
5376 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
5377 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
5378 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
5379 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
5380 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
5381 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
5382 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
5383 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
5384 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
5385
5386 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
5387 src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
5388
5389 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
5390 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
5391 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
5392 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
5393
5394 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
5395 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
5396 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
5397 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
5398 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
5399 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
5400 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
5401
5402 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
5403 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
5404 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
5405 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
5406 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
5407 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
5408 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
5409
5410 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
5411 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
5412 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
5413 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
5414
5415 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5416 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5417 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5418
5419       </div>
5420       <div class="tags">
5421
5422
5423         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5424
5425
5426       </div>
5427     </div>
5428     <div class="padding"></div>
5429
5430     <div class="entry">
5431       <div class="title">
5432         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
5433       </div>
5434       <div class="date">
5435         23rd December 2016
5436       </div>
5437       <div class="body">
5438         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
5439 readers probably know, I have been working on the
5440 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
5441 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
5442 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
5443 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
5444 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
5445 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
5446 metadata format.  And today,
5447 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
5448 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
5449 ie using fnmatch():</p>
5450
5451 <p><pre>
5452 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
5453   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
5454 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
5455 Name: pymissile
5456 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
5457 Package: pymissile
5458 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
5459 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
5460 Name: libnxt
5461 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
5462 Package: libnxt
5463 ---
5464 Identifier: t2n [generic]
5465 Name: t2n
5466 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
5467 Package: t2n
5468 ---
5469 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
5470 Name: python-nxt
5471 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
5472 Package: python-nxt
5473 ---
5474 Identifier: nbc [generic]
5475 Name: nbc
5476 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
5477 Package: nbc
5478 %
5479 </pre></p>
5480
5481 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
5482 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
5483
5484 <p><pre>
5485 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
5486 pymissile
5487 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
5488 libnxt
5489 nbc
5490 python-nxt
5491 t2n
5492 %
5493 </pre></p>
5494
5495 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
5496 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
5497
5498 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
5499 make the most of the hardware they have, please help
5500 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
5501 metadata for your package following the guidelines</a> documented in
5502 the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such information, among the
5503 several hundred hardware specific packages in Debian. The Isenkram
5504 database on the other hand contain 101 packages, mostly related to USB
5505 dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware mapping in AppStream are
5506 LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as part of my involvement in
5507 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
5508 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
5509 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
5510 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
5511 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
5512 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
5513 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
5514 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
5515 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
5516
5517 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5518 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5519 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5520
5521       </div>
5522       <div class="tags">
5523
5524
5525         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5526
5527
5528       </div>
5529     </div>
5530     <div class="padding"></div>
5531
5532     <div class="entry">
5533       <div class="title">
5534         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
5535       </div>
5536       <div class="date">
5537         20th December 2016
5538       </div>
5539       <div class="body">
5540         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
5541 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
5542 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
5543 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
5544 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
5545 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
5546 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
5547 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
5548 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
5549 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
5550
5551 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
5552
5553 <p><pre>
5554 % isenkram-lookup
5555 bluez
5556 cheese
5557 ethtool
5558 fprintd
5559 fprintd-demo
5560 gkrellm-thinkbat
5561 hdapsd
5562 libpam-fprintd
5563 pidgin-blinklight
5564 thinkfan
5565 tlp
5566 tp-smapi-dkms
5567 tp-smapi-source
5568 tpb
5569 %
5570 </pre></p>
5571
5572 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
5573 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
5574 I have all the firmware my machine need:
5575
5576 <p><pre>
5577 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5578 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
5579 %
5580 </pre></p>
5581
5582 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
5583 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
5584 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
5585 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
5586 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
5587 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
5588 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
5589 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
5590
5591 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
5592 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
5593 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
5594
5595 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
5596 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
5597 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
5598 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
5599 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
5600 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
5601 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
5602 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
5603 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
5604 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
5605 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
5606 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
5607 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
5608 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
5609 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
5610 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
5611 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
5612 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
5613 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
5614 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
5615 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
5616 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
5617 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
5618 zd1211-firmware</p>
5619
5620 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
5621 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
5622 maintainer to
5623 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
5624 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
5625 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
5626 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
5627
5628 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
5629 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
5630 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
5631 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
5632 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
5633
5634       </div>
5635       <div class="tags">
5636
5637
5638         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5639
5640
5641       </div>
5642     </div>
5643     <div class="padding"></div>
5644
5645     <div class="entry">
5646       <div class="title">
5647         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
5648       </div>
5649       <div class="date">
5650         11th December 2016
5651       </div>
5652       <div class="body">
5653         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
5654
5655 <p>In my early years, I played
5656 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
5657 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
5658 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
5659 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
5660 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
5661 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
5662 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
5663 small.</p>
5664
5665 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
5666 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
5667 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
5668 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
5669 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
5670 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
5671 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
5672 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
5673 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
5674
5675 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
5676 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
5677 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
5678 advantages of the
5679 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
5680 where information about each planet is easily available with common
5681 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
5682 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
5683 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
5684 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
5685 after less then a week.</p>
5686
5687 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
5688 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
5689 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
5690
5691 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5692 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5693 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5694
5695       </div>
5696       <div class="tags">
5697
5698
5699         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5700
5701
5702       </div>
5703     </div>
5704     <div class="padding"></div>
5705
5706     <div class="entry">
5707       <div class="title">
5708         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
5709       </div>
5710       <div class="date">
5711         25th November 2016
5712       </div>
5713       <div class="body">
5714         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
5715 installation system, observing how using
5716 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
5717 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
5718 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
5719 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
5720 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
5721 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
5722 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
5723 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
5724 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
5725 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
5726 up the process make perfect sense.
5727
5728 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
5729 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
5730 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
5731 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
5732 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
5733 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
5734 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
5735 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
5736 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
5737 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
5738
5739 <blockquote><pre>
5740 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
5741 </pre></blockquote>
5742
5743 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
5744 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
5745 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
5746 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
5747 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
5748 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
5749 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
5750 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
5751 tested its impact.</p>
5752
5753
5754       </div>
5755       <div class="tags">
5756
5757
5758         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5759
5760
5761       </div>
5762     </div>
5763     <div class="padding"></div>
5764
5765     <div class="entry">
5766       <div class="title">
5767         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Oversette_bokm_l_til_nynorsk__enklere_enn_du_tror_takket_v_re_Apertium.html">Oversette bokmål til nynorsk, enklere enn du tror takket være Apertium</a>
5768       </div>
5769       <div class="date">
5770         24th November 2016
5771       </div>
5772       <div class="body">
5773         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
5774 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
5775 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
5776 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
5777 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
5778 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
5779 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
5780 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
5781 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
5782 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
5783 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
5784 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
5785 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
5786 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
5787 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
5788 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
5789 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
5790 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
5791 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
5792
5793 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
5794 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
5795 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
5796 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
5797 api.apertium.org.  Se
5798 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
5799 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
5800 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
5801 nynorsk.</p>
5802
5803 <hr/>
5804
5805 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
5806 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
5807 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
5808 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
5809 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
5810 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
5811 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
5812 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
5813 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
5814 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
5815 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
5816 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
5817 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
5818 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
5819 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
5820 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
5821 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
5822 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
5823 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
5824
5825 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
5826 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
5827 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
5828 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
5829 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
5830 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
5831 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
5832 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
5833 nynorsk.</p>
5834
5835       </div>
5836       <div class="tags">
5837
5838
5839         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
5840
5841
5842       </div>
5843     </div>
5844     <div class="padding"></div>
5845
5846     <div class="entry">
5847       <div class="title">
5848         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
5849       </div>
5850       <div class="date">
5851         13th November 2016
5852       </div>
5853       <div class="body">
5854         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
5855 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
5856 multi-threaded program, finally
5857 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
5858 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
5859 months since
5860 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
5861 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
5862 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
5863 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
5864 JavaScript libraries.</p>
5865
5866 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
5867
5868 <p><blockquote>
5869 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
5870 </blockquote></p>
5871
5872 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
5873 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
5874 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
5875 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
5876 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
5877
5878 <p><blockquote>
5879 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
5880 </blockquote></p>
5881
5882 <p>See the project home page and the
5883 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
5884 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
5885 working.</p>
5886
5887       </div>
5888       <div class="tags">
5889
5890
5891         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5892
5893
5894       </div>
5895     </div>
5896     <div class="padding"></div>
5897
5898     <div class="entry">
5899       <div class="title">
5900         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
5901       </div>
5902       <div class="date">
5903          4th November 2016
5904       </div>
5905       <div class="body">
5906         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
5907 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
5908 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
5909 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
5910 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
5911 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
5912 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
5913 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
5914 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
5915 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
5916 and had
5917 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
5918 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
5919 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
5920 loved ones. :)</p>
5921
5922 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
5923 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
5924 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
5925 building
5926 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
5927 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
5928 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
5929 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
5930 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
5931 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
5932 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
5933 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
5934
5935 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
5936
5937 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
5938 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
5939 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
5940 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
5941 the battery status run low:</p>
5942
5943 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
5944    <source src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
5945 </video></p>
5946
5947 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
5948 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
5949
5950 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
5951 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
5952 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
5953 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
5954 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
5955 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
5956 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
5957 should.</p>
5958
5959       </div>
5960       <div class="tags">
5961
5962
5963         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
5964
5965
5966       </div>
5967     </div>
5968     <div class="padding"></div>
5969
5970     <div class="entry">
5971       <div class="title">
5972         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
5973       </div>
5974       <div class="date">
5975         10th October 2016
5976       </div>
5977       <div class="body">
5978         <p>In July
5979 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
5980 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
5981 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
5982 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
5983
5984 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
5985 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
5986 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
5987 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
5988 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
5989 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
5990 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
5991 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
5992 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
5993 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
5994 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
5995 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
5996 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
5997 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
5998 time.</p>
5999
6000 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
6001 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
6002 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
6003 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
6004 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
6005 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
6006 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
6007
6008 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
6009 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
6010 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
6011 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
6012 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
6013 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
6014 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
6015 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
6016 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
6017 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
6018
6019 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
6020
6021 <ol>
6022
6023 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
6024 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
6025 know, so you need to install it.
6026
6027 <pre>
6028 apt install git tor chromium
6029 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
6030 </pre></li>
6031
6032 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
6033 block below.</li>
6034
6035 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
6036 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
6037
6038 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
6039 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
6040 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
6041 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
6042 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
6043
6044 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
6045 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
6046 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
6047 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
6048 a associated contact database.</li>
6049
6050 </ol>
6051
6052 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
6053 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
6054 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
6055 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
6056 example
6057 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
6058 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
6059 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
6060 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
6061 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
6062 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
6063 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
6064 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
6065 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
6066 working on Debian Stable.</p>
6067
6068 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
6069 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
6070 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
6071
6072 <pre>
6073 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
6074 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
6075 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
6076 --- a/js/background.js
6077 +++ b/js/background.js
6078 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
6079          });
6080      });
6081
6082 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
6083 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
6084      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
6085 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
6086 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
6087      var messageReceiver;
6088      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
6089          if (messageReceiver) {
6090 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
6091 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
6092 --- a/js/expire.js
6093 +++ b/js/expire.js
6094 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
6095  ;(function() {
6096      'use strict';
6097 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
6098 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
6099
6100      window.extension = window.extension || {};
6101
6102 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
6103 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
6104 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
6105 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
6106 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
6107              return {
6108                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
6109                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
6110 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
6111 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
6112 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
6113              };
6114          },
6115          clearQR: function() {
6116 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
6117 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
6118 --- a/options.html
6119 +++ b/options.html
6120 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
6121          &lt;div class='nav'>
6122            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
6123            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
6124 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
6125 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
6126 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
6127 +
6128 +         &lt;/div>
6129            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
6130            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
6131            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
6132 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
6133 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
6134 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
6135 +#!/bin/sh
6136 +set -e
6137 +cd $(dirname $0)
6138 +mkdir -p userdata
6139 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
6140 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
6141 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
6142 +fi
6143 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
6144 +exec chromium \
6145 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
6146 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
6147 EOF
6148 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
6149 </pre>
6150
6151 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6152 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6153 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6154
6155       </div>
6156       <div class="tags">
6157
6158
6159         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6160
6161
6162       </div>
6163     </div>
6164     <div class="padding"></div>
6165
6166     <div class="entry">
6167       <div class="title">
6168         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
6169       </div>
6170       <div class="date">
6171          7th October 2016
6172       </div>
6173       <div class="body">
6174         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
6175 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
6176 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
6177 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
6178 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
6179 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
6180 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
6181 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
6182 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
6183 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
6184 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
6185 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
6186 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
6187
6188 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
6189 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
6190 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
6191 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
6192 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
6193 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
6194
6195 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
6196 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
6197 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
6198 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
6199 identifiers.</p>
6200
6201 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
6202 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
6203 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
6204 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
6205 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
6206 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
6207 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
6208 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
6209 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
6210 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
6211 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
6212 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
6213 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
6214 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
6215
6216 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
6217 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
6218 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
6219 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
6220 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
6221 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
6222 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
6223
6224 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
6225 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
6226 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
6227 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
6228 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
6229 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
6230 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
6231 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
6232 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
6233 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
6234 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
6235 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
6236 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
6237 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
6238 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
6239 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
6240 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
6241
6242 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
6243 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
6244 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
6245 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
6246 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
6247 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
6248 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
6249
6250 <p><pre>
6251 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
6252     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
6253 </pre></p>
6254
6255 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
6256 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
6257 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
6258 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
6259 to detect this?</p>
6260
6261 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
6262 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
6263 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
6264 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
6265 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
6266 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
6267 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
6268 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
6269 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
6270 directly if no such class exist.</p>
6271
6272 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6273 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6274 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6275
6276 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
6277 please join us on our IRC channel
6278 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
6279 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
6280 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
6281 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
6282
6283 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6284 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6285 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6286
6287       </div>
6288       <div class="tags">
6289
6290
6291         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
6292
6293
6294       </div>
6295     </div>
6296     <div class="padding"></div>
6297
6298     <div class="entry">
6299       <div class="title">
6300         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
6301       </div>
6302       <div class="date">
6303         30th August 2016
6304       </div>
6305       <div class="body">
6306         <p>In April we
6307 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
6308 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
6309 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
6310 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
6311 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
6312 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
6313 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
6314 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
6315 contributing using
6316 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
6317 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
6318 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
6319 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
6320 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
6321 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
6322 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
6323
6324 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
6325 electronic form.</p>
6326
6327       </div>
6328       <div class="tags">
6329
6330
6331         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6332
6333
6334       </div>
6335     </div>
6336     <div class="padding"></div>
6337
6338     <div class="entry">
6339       <div class="title">
6340         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
6341       </div>
6342       <div class="date">
6343         11th August 2016
6344       </div>
6345       <div class="body">
6346         <p>This summer, I read a great article
6347 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
6348 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
6349 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
6350 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
6351 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
6352 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
6353 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
6354 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
6355 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
6356 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
6357 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
6358 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
6359
6360 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
6361 get the system into Debian.  I
6362 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
6363 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
6364 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
6365 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
6366 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
6367 profiling information included in the source package.
6368 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
6369
6370 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
6371 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
6372
6373 <p><blockquote><pre>
6374 coz run --- program-to-run
6375 </pre></blockquote></p>
6376
6377 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
6378 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
6379 most, use a web browser and either point it to
6380 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
6381 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
6382 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
6383 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
6384 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
6385 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
6386 targeted experiments.</p>
6387
6388 <p>A video published by ACM
6389 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
6390 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
6391 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
6392 titled
6393 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
6394 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
6395
6396 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
6397 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
6398 because it uses a
6399 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
6400 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
6401 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
6402 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
6403
6404 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
6405 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
6406 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
6407 C++ libraries.</p>
6408
6409       </div>
6410       <div class="tags">
6411
6412
6413         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
6414
6415
6416       </div>
6417     </div>
6418     <div class="padding"></div>
6419
6420     <div class="entry">
6421       <div class="title">
6422         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
6423       </div>
6424       <div class="date">
6425          7th July 2016
6426       </div>
6427       <div class="body">
6428         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
6429 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
6430 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
6431 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
6432 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
6433 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
6434 microphone The initial idea had been to just
6435 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
6436 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
6437 until a few days ago.</p>
6438
6439 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
6440 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
6441 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
6442 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
6443 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
6444 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
6445 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
6446
6447 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
6448 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
6449 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
6450 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
6451 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
6452 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
6453 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
6454 him.</p>
6455
6456 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
6457 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
6458 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
6459 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
6460 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
6461 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
6462 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
6463 devices it would work for.</p>
6464
6465 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
6466 followed some instructions
6467 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
6468 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
6469 machine with Debian testing:</p>
6470
6471 <p><pre>
6472 adb reboot-bootloader
6473 fastboot oem rebootRUU
6474 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
6475 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
6476 fastboot reboot
6477 </pre></p>
6478
6479 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
6480 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
6481 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
6482 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
6483 too.</p>
6484
6485 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
6486 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
6487 like this:</p>
6488
6489 <p><pre>
6490 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
6491 </pre>
6492
6493 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
6494 this:</p>
6495
6496 <p><pre>
6497 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
6498 </pre></p>
6499
6500 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
6501 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
6502 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
6503 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
6504 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
6505
6506       </div>
6507       <div class="tags">
6508
6509
6510         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6511
6512
6513       </div>
6514     </div>
6515     <div class="padding"></div>
6516
6517     <div class="entry">
6518       <div class="title">
6519         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
6520       </div>
6521       <div class="date">
6522          3rd July 2016
6523       </div>
6524       <div class="body">
6525         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
6526 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
6527 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
6528 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
6529 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
6530 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
6531 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
6532 Github source, compared it to the source in
6533 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
6534 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
6535 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
6536 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
6537 the recipe how I did it.</p>
6538
6539 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
6540
6541 <pre>
6542 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
6543 </pre>
6544
6545 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
6546 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
6547
6548 <pre>
6549 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
6550 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
6551 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
6552 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
6553 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
6554          });
6555      });
6556
6557 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
6558 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
6559 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
6560 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
6561      var messageReceiver;
6562      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
6563          if (messageReceiver) {
6564 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
6565 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
6566 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
6567 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
6568  ;(function() {
6569      'use strict';
6570 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
6571 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
6572
6573      window.extension = window.extension || {};
6574
6575 EOF
6576 </pre>
6577
6578 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
6579 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
6580 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
6581 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
6582
6583 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
6584 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
6585
6586 <pre>
6587 #!/bin/sh
6588 cd $(dirname $0)
6589 mkdir -p userdata
6590 exec chromium \
6591   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
6592   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
6593 </pre>
6594
6595 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
6596 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
6597 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
6598 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
6599 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
6600
6601 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
6602 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
6603 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
6604 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
6605 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
6606 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
6607 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
6608 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
6609 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
6610 Signal from my laptop.
6611
6612 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
6613 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
6614 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
6615 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
6616 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
6617 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
6618 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
6619 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
6620 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
6621 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
6622 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
6623 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
6624
6625 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
6626 on this topic in
6627 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
6628 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
6629 phone</a>.</p>
6630
6631       </div>
6632       <div class="tags">
6633
6634
6635         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6636
6637
6638       </div>
6639     </div>
6640     <div class="padding"></div>
6641
6642     <div class="entry">
6643       <div class="title">
6644         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
6645       </div>
6646       <div class="date">
6647          6th June 2016
6648       </div>
6649       <div class="body">
6650         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
6651 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
6652 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
6653 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
6654 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
6655 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
6656 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
6657 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
6658 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
6659
6660 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
6661 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
6662 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
6663 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
6664 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
6665 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
6666 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
6667
6668 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
6669 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
6670 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
6671 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
6672 toten and parole.</p>
6673
6674 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
6675 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
6676 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
6677 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
6678 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
6679 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
6680 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
6681 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
6682 formats.</p>
6683
6684       </div>
6685       <div class="tags">
6686
6687
6688         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6689
6690
6691       </div>
6692     </div>
6693     <div class="padding"></div>
6694
6695     <div class="entry">
6696       <div class="title">
6697         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
6698       </div>
6699       <div class="date">
6700          5th June 2016
6701       </div>
6702       <div class="body">
6703         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
6704 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
6705 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
6706 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
6707 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
6708 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
6709 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
6710 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
6711 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
6712 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
6713 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
6714 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
6715 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
6716 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
6717 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
6718 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
6719 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
6720 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
6721 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
6722 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
6723
6724 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
6725 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
6726 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
6727 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
6728 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
6729 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
6730 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
6731 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
6732 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
6733 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
6734 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
6735 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
6736 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
6737 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
6738
6739 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
6740 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
6741 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
6742 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
6743 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
6744 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
6745 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
6746 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
6747
6748 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
6749 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
6750 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
6751 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
6752 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
6753 information is collected from
6754 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
6755 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
6756 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
6757 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
6758 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
6759 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
6760 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
6761 type (preferably
6762 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
6763 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
6764 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
6765 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
6766
6767 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
6768 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
6769 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
6770
6771 <p><blockquote><pre>
6772 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
6773 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
6774   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
6775     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
6776     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
6777     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
6778   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
6779 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
6780 </pre></blockquote></p>
6781
6782 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
6783 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
6784 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
6785 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
6786
6787 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
6788 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
6789 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
6790
6791 <p><blockquote><pre>
6792 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
6793 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
6794 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
6795 %
6796 </pre></blockquote></p>
6797
6798 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
6799 MimeType= line.</p>
6800
6801 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
6802 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
6803 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
6804 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
6805 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
6806 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
6807 fixed. :)</p>
6808
6809       </div>
6810       <div class="tags">
6811
6812
6813         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6814
6815
6816       </div>
6817     </div>
6818     <div class="padding"></div>
6819
6820     <div class="entry">
6821       <div class="title">
6822         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
6823       </div>
6824       <div class="date">
6825         25th May 2016
6826       </div>
6827       <div class="body">
6828         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
6829 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
6830 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
6831 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
6832 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
6833 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
6834 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
6835 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
6836 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
6837 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
6838 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
6839 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
6840
6841 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
6842 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
6843 is going away and is generally being replaced by
6844 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
6845 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
6846 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
6847 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
6848 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
6849 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
6850 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
6851 and see if it is recognised.</p>
6852
6853 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
6854 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
6855 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
6856
6857 <p><blockquote><pre>
6858 % isenkram-lookup
6859 bluez
6860 cheese
6861 fprintd
6862 fprintd-demo
6863 gkrellm-thinkbat
6864 hdapsd
6865 libpam-fprintd
6866 pidgin-blinklight
6867 thinkfan
6868 tleds
6869 tp-smapi-dkms
6870 tp-smapi-source
6871 tpb
6872 %p
6873 </pre></blockquote></p>
6874
6875 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
6876 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
6877 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
6878 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
6879 See
6880 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
6881 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
6882
6883       </div>
6884       <div class="tags">
6885
6886
6887         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6888
6889
6890       </div>
6891     </div>
6892     <div class="padding"></div>
6893
6894     <div class="entry">
6895       <div class="title">
6896         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
6897       </div>
6898       <div class="date">
6899         23rd May 2016
6900       </div>
6901       <div class="body">
6902         <p>Yesterday I updated the
6903 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
6904 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
6905 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
6906 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
6907 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
6908 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
6909 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
6910 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
6911 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
6912 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
6913
6914 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
6915 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
6916 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
6917 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
6918 capacity.</p>
6919
6920 <p align="center"><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
6921
6922 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
6923 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
6924 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
6925 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
6926
6927 <p align="center"><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
6928
6929 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
6930 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
6931 shrinking. :(</p>
6932
6933 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
6934 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
6935 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
6936 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
6937 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
6938 machine.</p>
6939
6940 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
6941 check out the
6942 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
6943 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
6944 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
6945 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
6946 Patches are very welcome.</p>
6947
6948 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6949 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6950 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6951
6952       </div>
6953       <div class="tags">
6954
6955
6956         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6957
6958
6959       </div>
6960     </div>
6961     <div class="padding"></div>
6962
6963     <div class="entry">
6964       <div class="title">
6965         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
6966       </div>
6967       <div class="date">
6968         12th May 2016
6969       </div>
6970       <div class="body">
6971         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
6972 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
6973 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
6974 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
6975 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
6976 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
6977 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
6978 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
6979 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
6980 great if you could help out with
6981 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
6982 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
6983
6984       </div>
6985       <div class="tags">
6986
6987
6988         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6989
6990
6991       </div>
6992     </div>
6993     <div class="padding"></div>
6994
6995     <div class="entry">
6996       <div class="title">
6997         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
6998       </div>
6999       <div class="date">
7000          8th May 2016
7001       </div>
7002       <div class="body">
7003         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
7004 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
7005
7006 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
7007 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
7008 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
7009 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
7010 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
7011 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
7012 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
7013 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
7014 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
7015 players.</p>
7016
7017 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
7018 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
7019 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
7020 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
7021 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
7022 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
7023 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
7024 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
7025 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
7026 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
7027 support most file formats.</p>
7028
7029 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
7030 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
7031 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
7032 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
7033 listed first in the table.</p>
7034
7035 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
7036 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
7037 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
7038 support?</p>
7039
7040       </div>
7041       <div class="tags">
7042
7043
7044         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
7045
7046
7047       </div>
7048     </div>
7049     <div class="padding"></div>
7050
7051     <div class="entry">
7052       <div class="title">
7053         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
7054       </div>
7055       <div class="date">
7056          4th May 2016
7057       </div>
7058       <div class="body">
7059         A friend of mine made me aware of
7060 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
7061 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
7062 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
7063
7064 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
7065 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
7066 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
7067 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
7068 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
7069 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
7070 production started.</p>
7071
7072 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
7073 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
7074 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
7075
7076       </div>
7077       <div class="tags">
7078
7079
7080         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7081
7082
7083       </div>
7084     </div>
7085     <div class="padding"></div>
7086
7087     <div class="entry">
7088       <div class="title">
7089         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
7090       </div>
7091       <div class="date">
7092         10th April 2016
7093       </div>
7094       <div class="body">
7095         <p>During this weekends
7096 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
7097 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
7098 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
7099 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
7100 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
7101 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
7102 contributing using
7103 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
7104 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
7105 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
7106 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
7107 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
7108 contributors</a>.</p>
7109
7110 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
7111 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
7112 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
7113 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
7114 available for many more languages.</p>
7115
7116       </div>
7117       <div class="tags">
7118
7119
7120         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7121
7122
7123       </div>
7124     </div>
7125     <div class="padding"></div>
7126
7127     <div class="entry">
7128       <div class="title">
7129         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
7130       </div>
7131       <div class="date">
7132          7th April 2016
7133       </div>
7134       <div class="body">
7135         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
7136 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
7137 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
7138 But I might be wrong.</p>
7139
7140 <p>According to
7141 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
7142 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
7143 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
7144 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
7145 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
7146 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
7147 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
7148 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
7149 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
7150 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
7151
7152 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
7153 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
7154 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
7155 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
7156 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
7157 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
7158 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
7159 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
7160 team status page</a>, and
7161 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
7162 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
7163
7164 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
7165 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
7166 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
7167 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
7168 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
7169 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
7170 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
7171 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
7172 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
7173 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
7174 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
7175 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
7176
7177       </div>
7178       <div class="tags">
7179
7180
7181         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7182
7183
7184       </div>
7185     </div>
7186     <div class="padding"></div>
7187
7188     <div class="entry">
7189       <div class="title">
7190         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
7191       </div>
7192       <div class="date">
7193         23rd March 2016
7194       </div>
7195       <div class="body">
7196         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
7197 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
7198 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
7199 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
7200 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
7201 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
7202 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
7203 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
7204
7205 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
7206 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
7207 and lifetime prediction by running:
7208
7209 <p><pre>
7210 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
7211 </pre></p>
7212
7213 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
7214
7215 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
7216 entry yet):</p>
7217
7218 <p><pre>
7219 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
7220 </pre></p>
7221
7222 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
7223 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
7224 few years of data.</p>
7225
7226 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
7227 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
7228 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
7229 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
7230 know.  The issue is reported as
7231 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
7232 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
7233 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
7234 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
7235 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
7236
7237 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
7238 check out the
7239 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
7240 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
7241 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
7242 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
7243 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
7244
7245       </div>
7246       <div class="tags">
7247
7248
7249         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7250
7251
7252       </div>
7253     </div>
7254     <div class="padding"></div>
7255
7256     <div class="entry">
7257       <div class="title">
7258         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
7259       </div>
7260       <div class="date">
7261         15th March 2016
7262       </div>
7263       <div class="body">
7264         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
7265 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
7266 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
7267 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
7268 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
7269 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
7270 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
7271 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
7272 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
7273 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
7274 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
7275
7276 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
7277 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
7278 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
7279 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
7280 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
7281 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
7282 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
7283 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
7284 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
7285 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
7286 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
7287
7288 <p align="center"><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
7289
7290 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
7291 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
7292 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
7293 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
7294 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
7295 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
7296
7297 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
7298 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
7299 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
7300 and graphing.</p>
7301
7302 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
7303 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
7304 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
7305 on
7306 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
7307 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
7308
7309       </div>
7310       <div class="tags">
7311
7312
7313         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7314
7315
7316       </div>
7317     </div>
7318     <div class="padding"></div>
7319
7320     <div class="entry">
7321       <div class="title">
7322         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
7323       </div>
7324       <div class="date">
7325         19th February 2016
7326       </div>
7327       <div class="body">
7328         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
7329 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
7330 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
7331 the code in the package in question, preferably in
7332 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
7333 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
7334
7335 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
7336 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
7337 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
7338 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
7339 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
7340 out what was wrong with
7341 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
7342 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
7343 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
7344 semi-automatically.</p>
7345
7346 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
7347 file based on the code in the source package,
7348 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
7349 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
7350 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
7351 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
7352 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
7353 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
7354 option in
7355 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
7356 blog posts from 2014</a>.
7357
7358 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
7359
7360 <p><pre>
7361 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
7362 </pre></p>
7363
7364 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
7365 this might not be the best option.</p>
7366
7367 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
7368 this approach in
7369 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
7370 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
7371 dpkg-copyright' option:
7372
7373 <p><pre>
7374 cme update dpkg-copyright
7375 </pre></p>
7376
7377 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
7378 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
7379
7380 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
7381 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
7382 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
7383 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
7384 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
7385 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
7386 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
7387 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
7388 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
7389 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
7390
7391 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
7392 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
7393 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
7394 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
7395
7396 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
7397 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
7398 planet.debian.org.</p>
7399
7400 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7401 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7402 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7403
7404 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
7405 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
7406
7407 <p><pre>
7408 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
7409   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
7410 </pre></p>
7411
7412 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
7413 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
7414 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
7415 with my packages in the future.</p>
7416
7417 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
7418 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
7419 command line.</p>
7420
7421       </div>
7422       <div class="tags">
7423
7424
7425         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7426
7427
7428       </div>
7429     </div>
7430     <div class="padding"></div>
7431
7432     <div class="entry">
7433       <div class="title">
7434         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
7435       </div>
7436       <div class="date">
7437          4th February 2016
7438       </div>
7439       <div class="body">
7440         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
7441 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
7442 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
7443 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
7444 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
7445 about. :)</p>
7446
7447 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
7448 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
7449 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
7450 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
7451 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
7452 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
7453
7454 <blockquote><pre>
7455 % apt install appstream
7456 [...]
7457 % apt update
7458 [...]
7459 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
7460   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
7461 firmware-qlogic
7462 %
7463 </pre></blockquote>
7464
7465 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
7466 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
7467 a way appstream can use.</p>
7468
7469 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
7470 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
7471 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
7472 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
7473 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
7474 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
7475
7476 <blockquote><pre>
7477 % apt install appstream
7478 [...]
7479 % apt update
7480 [...]
7481 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
7482   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
7483 bkchem
7484 phototonic
7485 inkscape
7486 shutter
7487 tetzle
7488 geeqie
7489 xia
7490 pinta
7491 gthumb
7492 karbon
7493 comix
7494 mirage
7495 viewnior
7496 postr
7497 ristretto
7498 kolourpaint4
7499 eog
7500 eom
7501 gimagereader
7502 midori
7503 %
7504 </pre></blockquote>
7505
7506 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
7507 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
7508
7509       </div>
7510       <div class="tags">
7511
7512
7513         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7514
7515
7516       </div>
7517     </div>
7518     <div class="padding"></div>
7519
7520     <div class="entry">
7521       <div class="title">
7522         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
7523       </div>
7524       <div class="date">
7525         24th January 2016
7526       </div>
7527       <div class="body">
7528         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
7529 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
7530 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
7531 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
7532 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
7533 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
7534 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
7535 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
7536 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
7537 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
7538 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
7539 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
7540 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
7541 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
7542 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
7543 entities.</p>
7544
7545 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
7546
7547 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
7548 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
7549 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
7550 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
7551 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
7552 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
7553 tool to do so is called
7554 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
7555 discovered it when I read
7556 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
7557 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
7558 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
7559 The python program was in Debian, but
7560 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
7561 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
7562 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
7563 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
7564 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
7565 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
7566 are now included
7567 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
7568
7569 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
7570 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
7571 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
7572 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
7573 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
7574 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
7575 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
7576 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
7577 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
7578 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
7579 about yourself with the services.</p>
7580
7581 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
7582 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
7583 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
7584 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
7585 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
7586 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
7587 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
7588 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
7589 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
7590 things.  A similar technique have been
7591 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
7592 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
7593 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
7594 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
7595 public.</p>
7596
7597 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
7598 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
7599 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
7600 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
7601
7602 <p>(I have uploaded
7603 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
7604 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
7605 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
7606
7607       </div>
7608       <div class="tags">
7609
7610
7611         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
7612
7613
7614       </div>
7615     </div>
7616     <div class="padding"></div>
7617
7618     <div class="entry">
7619       <div class="title">
7620         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
7621       </div>
7622       <div class="date">
7623         15th January 2016
7624       </div>
7625       <div class="body">
7626         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
7627 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
7628 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
7629 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
7630 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
7631 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
7632 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
7633 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
7634 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
7635 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
7636 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
7637 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
7638 was not the first to propose this, as the
7639 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
7640 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
7641 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
7642 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
7643
7644 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
7645 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
7646 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
7647 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
7648 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
7649
7650 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
7651 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
7652 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
7653 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
7654 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
7655 done in /etc/.</p>
7656
7657 <blockquote><pre>
7658 apt install apt-transport-tor
7659 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
7660 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
7661 </pre></blockquote>
7662
7663 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
7664 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
7665 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
7666 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
7667
7668 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
7669 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
7670 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
7671 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
7672 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
7673 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
7674
7675 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
7676 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
7677 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
7678 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
7679 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
7680
7681 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
7682 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
7683 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
7684 system.</p>
7685
7686       </div>
7687       <div class="tags">
7688
7689
7690         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7691
7692
7693       </div>
7694     </div>
7695     <div class="padding"></div>
7696
7697     <div class="entry">
7698       <div class="title">
7699         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
7700       </div>
7701       <div class="date">
7702         23rd December 2015
7703       </div>
7704       <div class="body">
7705         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
7706 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
7707 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
7708 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
7709 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
7710 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
7711
7712 <p>A few days I came across
7713 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
7714 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
7715 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
7716 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
7717 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
7718 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
7719 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
7720 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
7721 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
7722 discovered the developer
7723 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
7724 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
7725 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
7726 archive.</p>
7727
7728 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
7729 it into Debian, where it currently
7730 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
7731 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
7732
7733 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
7734 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
7735 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
7736 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
7737 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
7738 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
7739 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
7740 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
7741 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
7742 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
7743 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
7744 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
7745
7746 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
7747 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
7748 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
7749 package show up in unstable.</p>
7750
7751       </div>
7752       <div class="tags">
7753
7754
7755         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
7756
7757
7758       </div>
7759     </div>
7760     <div class="padding"></div>
7761
7762     <div class="entry">
7763       <div class="title">
7764         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
7765       </div>
7766       <div class="date">
7767         20th December 2015
7768       </div>
7769       <div class="body">
7770         <p>Around three years ago, I created
7771 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
7772 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
7773 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
7774 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
7775 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
7776 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
7777 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
7778 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
7779 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
7780 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
7781 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
7782 with.</p>
7783
7784 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
7785 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
7786 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
7787 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
7788 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
7789 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
7790 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
7791 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
7792 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
7793 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
7794 Debian version of appstream.</p>
7795
7796 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
7797 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
7798 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
7799 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
7800 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
7801 how do add the required
7802 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
7803 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
7804 this content:</p>
7805
7806 <blockquote><pre>
7807 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
7808 &lt;component&gt;
7809   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
7810   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
7811   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
7812   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
7813   &lt;description&gt;
7814     &lt;p&gt;
7815       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
7816       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
7817       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
7818       launcher.
7819     &lt;/p&gt;
7820   &lt;/description&gt;
7821   &lt;provides&gt;
7822     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
7823   &lt;/provides&gt;
7824 &lt;/component&gt;
7825 </pre></blockquote>
7826
7827 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
7828 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
7829 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
7830 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
7831 0202.</p>
7832
7833 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
7834 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
7835 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
7836 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
7837 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
7838 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
7839 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
7840 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
7841
7842 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
7843 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
7844 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
7845 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
7846 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
7847
7848 <blockquote><pre>
7849 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
7850 </pre></blockquote>
7851
7852 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
7853 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
7854 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
7855 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
7856 question.</p>
7857
7858 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
7859 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
7860
7861 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
7862 try running this command on the command line:</p>
7863
7864 <blockquote><pre>
7865 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
7866 </pre></blockquote>
7867
7868 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
7869 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
7870 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
7871
7872       </div>
7873       <div class="tags">
7874
7875
7876         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7877
7878
7879       </div>
7880     </div>
7881     <div class="padding"></div>
7882
7883     <div class="entry">
7884       <div class="title">
7885         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
7886       </div>
7887       <div class="date">
7888         30th November 2015
7889       </div>
7890       <div class="body">
7891         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
7892 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
7893 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
7894 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
7895 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
7896
7897 <blockquote>
7898
7899 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
7900
7901 <blockquote>
7902 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
7903
7904 The first step is to choose a
7905 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
7906 code.<br/>
7907
7908 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
7909 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
7910
7911 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
7912 work<br/>
7913
7914 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
7915 </blockquote>
7916
7917 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
7918 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
7919 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
7920 0x57</a></small></p>
7921
7922 <p>As the Debian Website
7923 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
7924 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
7925 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
7926 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
7927 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
7928 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
7929 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
7930 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
7931 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
7932 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
7933 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
7934 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
7935 Freedom">FaiF</a>
7936 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
7937 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
7938 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
7939 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
7940 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
7941 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
7942 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
7943 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
7944 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
7945 In March the SFC supported a
7946 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
7947 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
7948 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
7949 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
7950 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
7951 conferences
7952 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
7953 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
7954 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
7955 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
7956 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
7957 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
7958 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
7959 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
7960 Software.</p>
7961
7962 <p>If you support Free Software,
7963 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
7964 what the SFC do, agree with their
7965 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
7966 principles</a>, are happy about their
7967 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
7968 work on a project that is an SFC
7969 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
7970 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
7971 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
7972 Allan Webber</a>,
7973 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
7974 Smith</a>,
7975 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
7976 Bacon</a>, myself and
7977 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
7978 becoming a
7979 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
7980 next week your donation will be
7981 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
7982 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
7983 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
7984 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
7985 social media accounts.</p>
7986
7987 </blockquote>
7988
7989 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
7990 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
7991 supporter too?</p>
7992
7993       </div>
7994       <div class="tags">
7995
7996
7997         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
7998
7999
8000       </div>
8001     </div>
8002     <div class="padding"></div>
8003
8004     <div class="entry">
8005       <div class="title">
8006         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
8007       </div>
8008       <div class="date">
8009         17th November 2015
8010       </div>
8011       <div class="body">
8012         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
8013 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
8014 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
8015 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
8016 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
8017 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
8018 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
8019 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
8020 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
8021 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
8022
8023 <pre>
8024 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
8025       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
8026 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
8027 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
8028 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
8029 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
8030 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
8031 </pre>
8032
8033 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
8034 my old key.</p>
8035
8036 <p>If you signed my old key
8037 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
8038 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
8039 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
8040 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
8041
8042       </div>
8043       <div class="tags">
8044
8045
8046         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
8047
8048
8049       </div>
8050     </div>
8051     <div class="padding"></div>
8052
8053     <div class="entry">
8054       <div class="title">
8055         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
8056       </div>
8057       <div class="date">
8058         24th September 2015
8059       </div>
8060       <div class="body">
8061         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
8062 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
8063 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
8064 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
8065 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
8066 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
8067 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
8068
8069 <img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
8070
8071 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
8072 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
8073 by someone else.  I found
8074 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
8075 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
8076 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
8077 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
8078 from him.  Via
8079 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
8080 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
8081 discovered
8082 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
8083 available in Debian.</p>
8084
8085 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
8086 battery stats ever since. Now my
8087 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
8088 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
8089 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
8090 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
8091
8092 <pre>
8093 #!/bin/sh
8094 # Inspired by
8095 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
8096 # See also
8097 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
8098 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
8099
8100 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
8101     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
8102
8103 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
8104     (
8105         printf "timestamp,"
8106         for f in $files; do
8107             printf "%s," $f
8108         done
8109         echo
8110     ) > "$logfile"
8111 fi
8112
8113 log_battery() {
8114     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
8115     # when several log processes run in parallel.
8116     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
8117         for f in $files; do \
8118             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
8119         done)
8120     echo "$msg"
8121 }
8122
8123 cd /sys/class/power_supply
8124
8125 for bat in BAT*; do
8126     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
8127 done
8128 </pre>
8129
8130 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
8131 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
8132 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
8133 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
8134 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
8135 The code for the Debian package
8136 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
8137 available on github</a>.</p>
8138
8139 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
8140
8141 <pre>
8142 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
8143 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
8144 [...]
8145 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
8146 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
8147 </pre>
8148
8149 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
8150 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
8151 battery.</p>
8152
8153 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
8154 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
8155 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
8156 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
8157 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
8158 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
8159 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
8160 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
8161 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
8162 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
8163 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
8164 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
8165 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
8166 Linux too.</p>
8167
8168 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
8169 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
8170 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
8171 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
8172 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
8173 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
8174 load).</p>
8175
8176 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
8177 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
8178 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
8179 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
8180 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
8181 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
8182 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
8183 those.</p>
8184
8185 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
8186 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
8187 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
8188 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
8189 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
8190 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
8191 specific.</p>
8192
8193       </div>
8194       <div class="tags">
8195
8196
8197         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8198
8199
8200       </div>
8201     </div>
8202     <div class="padding"></div>
8203
8204     <div class="entry">
8205       <div class="title">
8206         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
8207       </div>
8208       <div class="date">
8209          5th July 2015
8210       </div>
8211       <div class="body">
8212         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
8213 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
8214 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
8215 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
8216 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
8217 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
8218 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
8219 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
8220 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
8221 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
8222 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
8223
8224 <p>One tip I got was to use the
8225 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
8226 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
8227 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
8228 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
8229 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
8230 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
8231
8232 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
8233 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
8234 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
8235 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
8236 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
8237 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
8238 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
8239 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
8240 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
8241 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
8242 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
8243 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
8244 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
8245 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
8246 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
8247
8248 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
8249 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
8250 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
8251 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
8252
8253 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
8254 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
8255
8256 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
8257 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
8258 different
8259 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
8260 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
8261
8262       </div>
8263       <div class="tags">
8264
8265
8266         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8267
8268
8269       </div>
8270     </div>
8271     <div class="padding"></div>
8272
8273     <div class="entry">
8274       <div class="title">
8275         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
8276       </div>
8277       <div class="date">
8278          3rd July 2015
8279       </div>
8280       <div class="body">
8281         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
8282 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
8283 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
8284 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
8285 flickering.</p>
8286
8287 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
8288 still as
8289 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
8290 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
8291 good help from
8292 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
8293 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
8294 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
8295 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
8296 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
8297 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
8298 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
8299 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
8300 deteriorated since X41.</p>
8301
8302 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
8303 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
8304 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
8305 have suggestions.</p>
8306
8307 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
8308 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
8309 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
8310
8311       </div>
8312       <div class="tags">
8313
8314
8315         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8316
8317
8318       </div>
8319     </div>
8320     <div class="padding"></div>
8321
8322     <div class="entry">
8323       <div class="title">
8324         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
8325       </div>
8326       <div class="date">
8327         22nd November 2014
8328       </div>
8329       <div class="body">
8330         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
8331 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
8332 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
8333 courtesy of
8334 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
8335 Schubert</a> and
8336 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
8337 McVittie</a>.
8338
8339 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
8340 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
8341 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
8342 you upgrade:</p>
8343
8344 <p><blockquote><pre>
8345 Package: systemd-sysv
8346 Pin: release o=Debian
8347 Pin-Priority: -1
8348 </pre></blockquote><p>
8349
8350 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
8351 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
8352 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
8353 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
8354 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
8355
8356 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
8357 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
8358 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
8359 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
8360 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
8361 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
8362
8363 <p><blockquote><pre>
8364 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
8365 </pre></blockquote><p>
8366
8367 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
8368
8369 <p><blockquote><pre>
8370 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
8371 </pre></blockquote><p>
8372
8373 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
8374 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
8375
8376 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
8377 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
8378 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
8379 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
8380 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
8381 Jessie is released.</p>
8382
8383 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
8384 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
8385 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
8386 line.</p>
8387
8388       </div>
8389       <div class="tags">
8390
8391
8392         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8393
8394
8395       </div>
8396     </div>
8397     <div class="padding"></div>
8398
8399     <div class="entry">
8400       <div class="title">
8401         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
8402       </div>
8403       <div class="date">
8404         10th November 2014
8405       </div>
8406       <div class="body">
8407         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
8408 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
8409 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
8410
8411 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
8412 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
8413 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
8414 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
8415 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
8416 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
8417 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
8418 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
8419 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
8420 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
8421 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
8422 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
8423 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
8424 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
8425 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
8426
8427 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
8428 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
8429 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
8430 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
8431 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
8432 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
8433 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
8434 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
8435 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
8436 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
8437 were fairly easy, and
8438 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
8439 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
8440 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
8441 useful approach.</p>
8442
8443 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
8444 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
8445 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
8446 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
8447 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
8448 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
8449 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
8450 this:</p>
8451
8452 <p><blockquote><pre>
8453 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
8454   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
8455 </pre></blockquote></p>
8456
8457 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
8458 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
8459
8460 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
8461 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
8462 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
8463 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
8464 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
8465 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
8466 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
8467 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
8468 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
8469 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
8470 system.</p>
8471
8472 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
8473 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
8474 SMTorP. :)</p>
8475
8476       </div>
8477       <div class="tags">
8478
8479
8480         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
8481
8482
8483       </div>
8484     </div>
8485     <div class="padding"></div>
8486
8487     <div class="entry">
8488       <div class="title">
8489         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
8490       </div>
8491       <div class="date">
8492         22nd October 2014
8493       </div>
8494       <div class="body">
8495         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
8496 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
8497 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
8498 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
8499 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
8500 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
8501 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
8502 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
8503 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
8504 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
8505 lists I recently took over:</p>
8506
8507 <p><blockquote><pre>
8508 % time listadmin xiph
8509 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
8510 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
8511
8512 real    0m1.709s
8513 user    0m0.232s
8514 sys     0m0.012s
8515 %
8516 </pre></blockquote></p>
8517
8518 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
8519 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
8520 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
8521 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
8522 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
8523 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
8524 program.</p>
8525
8526 <p>If you install
8527 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
8528 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
8529 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
8530
8531 <p><blockquote><pre>
8532 username username@example.org
8533 spamlevel 23
8534 default discard
8535 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
8536
8537 password secret
8538 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
8539 mailman-list@lists.example.com
8540
8541 password hidden
8542 other-list@otherserver.example.org
8543 </pre></blockquote></p>
8544
8545 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
8546 learn the details.</p>
8547
8548 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
8549 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
8550 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
8551 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
8552
8553 <p><blockquote><pre>
8554 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
8555 </pre></blockquote></p>
8556
8557 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
8558 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
8559 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
8560 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
8561 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
8562 email.</p>
8563
8564 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
8565 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
8566 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
8567 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
8568 software.</p>
8569
8570 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8571 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8572 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8573
8574 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
8575 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
8576 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
8577 sure why.</p>
8578
8579       </div>
8580       <div class="tags">
8581
8582
8583         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
8584
8585
8586       </div>
8587     </div>
8588     <div class="padding"></div>
8589
8590     <div class="entry">
8591       <div class="title">
8592         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
8593       </div>
8594       <div class="date">
8595         17th October 2014
8596       </div>
8597       <div class="body">
8598         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
8599 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
8600 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
8601 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
8602 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
8603 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
8604 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
8605
8606 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
8607 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
8608 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
8609 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
8610 of this story.)</p>
8611
8612 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
8613 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
8614 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
8615 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
8616 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
8617 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
8618 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
8619 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
8620 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
8621 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
8622
8623 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
8624 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
8625 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
8626 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
8627
8628 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
8629 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
8630
8631 <p><blockquote><pre>
8632 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
8633 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
8634 </pre></blockquote></p>
8635
8636 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
8637 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
8638 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
8639 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
8640 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
8641 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
8642 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
8643 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
8644
8645 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
8646 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
8647
8648 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
8649 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
8650 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
8651 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
8652 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
8653
8654 <p><blockquote><pre>
8655 Task: isenkram-packages
8656 Section: hardware
8657 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8658  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
8659  proposed.
8660 Test-new-install: show show
8661 Relevance: 8
8662 Packages: for-current-hardware
8663
8664 Task: isenkram-firmware
8665 Section: hardware
8666 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8667  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
8668  packages are proposed.
8669 Test-new-install: mark show
8670 Relevance: 8
8671 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
8672 </pre></blockquote></p>
8673
8674 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
8675 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
8676 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
8677 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
8678 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
8679
8680 <p><blockquote><pre>
8681 #!/bin/sh
8682 #
8683 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
8684 export PATH
8685 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
8686 </pre></blockquote></p>
8687
8688 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
8689 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
8690
8691 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
8692 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
8693 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
8694 install.</p>
8695
8696 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
8697 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
8698 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
8699
8700       </div>
8701       <div class="tags">
8702
8703
8704         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
8705
8706
8707       </div>
8708     </div>
8709     <div class="padding"></div>
8710
8711     <div class="entry">
8712       <div class="title">
8713         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
8714       </div>
8715       <div class="date">
8716          4th October 2014
8717       </div>
8718       <div class="body">
8719         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
8720 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
8721 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
8722 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
8723
8724 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
8725
8726 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
8727 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
8728 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
8729
8730       </div>
8731       <div class="tags">
8732
8733
8734         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8735
8736
8737       </div>
8738     </div>
8739     <div class="padding"></div>
8740
8741     <div class="entry">
8742       <div class="title">
8743         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
8744       </div>
8745       <div class="date">
8746          4th October 2014
8747       </div>
8748       <div class="body">
8749         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
8750 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
8751 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
8752 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
8753 Dibb.</p>
8754
8755 <p>I just wrapped up
8756 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
8757 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
8758 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
8759 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
8760 0.17.</p>
8761
8762 <ul>
8763
8764  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
8765  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
8766    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
8767  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
8768  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
8769  <li>Fix include orders</li>
8770  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
8771  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
8772  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
8773    the palette size is the same.</li>
8774  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
8775  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
8776  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
8777  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
8778    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
8779
8780 </ul>
8781
8782 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
8783 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
8784 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
8785
8786       </div>
8787       <div class="tags">
8788
8789
8790         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8791
8792
8793       </div>
8794     </div>
8795     <div class="padding"></div>
8796
8797     <div class="entry">
8798       <div class="title">
8799         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
8800       </div>
8801       <div class="date">
8802         26th September 2014
8803       </div>
8804       <div class="body">
8805         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8806 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
8807 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
8808 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
8809 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
8810 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
8811 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
8812 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
8813 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
8814 future.  The
8815 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
8816 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
8817 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
8818 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
8819 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
8820
8821 <p>First, download the test ISO via
8822 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
8823 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
8824 or rsync (use
8825 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
8826 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
8827 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
8828 install with some tweaking.</p>
8829
8830 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
8831 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
8832
8833 <p><blockquote><pre>
8834 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
8835 </pre></blockquote></p>
8836
8837 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
8838 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
8839 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
8840 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
8841
8842 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
8843 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
8844 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
8845 your need.</p>
8846
8847 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
8848 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
8849 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
8850 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
8851 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
8852 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
8853 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
8854 days.</p>
8855
8856 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
8857 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
8858 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
8859 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
8860 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
8861 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
8862 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
8863 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
8864 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
8865
8866 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
8867 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
8868 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
8869
8870       </div>
8871       <div class="tags">
8872
8873
8874         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8875
8876
8877       </div>
8878     </div>
8879     <div class="padding"></div>
8880
8881     <div class="entry">
8882       <div class="title">
8883         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
8884       </div>
8885       <div class="date">
8886         25th September 2014
8887       </div>
8888       <div class="body">
8889         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
8890 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
8891 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
8892 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
8893 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
8894 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
8895 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
8896 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
8897 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
8898 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
8899 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
8900 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
8901 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
8902
8903 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
8904 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
8905 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
8906 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
8907 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
8908 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
8909 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
8910 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
8911 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
8912 list</a>. :)</p>
8913
8914       </div>
8915       <div class="tags">
8916
8917
8918         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8919
8920
8921       </div>
8922     </div>
8923     <div class="padding"></div>
8924
8925     <div class="entry">
8926       <div class="title">
8927         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
8928       </div>
8929       <div class="date">
8930         16th September 2014
8931       </div>
8932       <div class="body">
8933         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
8934 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
8935 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
8936 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
8937 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
8938 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
8939 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
8940 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
8941 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
8942 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
8943 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
8944 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
8945 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
8946 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
8947
8948 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
8949 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
8950 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
8951 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
8952 depend on the small and clever package
8953 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
8954 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
8955 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
8956 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
8957 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
8958 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
8959 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
8960 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
8961 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
8962 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
8963 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
8964
8965 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
8966 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
8967 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
8968 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
8969 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
8970 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
8971 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
8972 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
8973 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
8974 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
8975 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
8976 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
8977 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
8978 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
8979 dialog.</p>
8980
8981 <p><table>
8982
8983 <tr>
8984 <th>Machine/setup</th>
8985 <th>Original tasksel</th>
8986 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
8987 <th>Reduction</th>
8988 </tr>
8989
8990 <tr>
8991 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
8992 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
8993 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
8994 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
8995 </tr>
8996
8997 <tr>
8998 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
8999 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
9000 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
9001 <td>23 min 40%</td>
9002 </tr>
9003
9004 <tr>
9005 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
9006 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
9007 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
9008 <td>11 min 50%</td>
9009 </tr>
9010
9011 <tr>
9012 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
9013 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
9014 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
9015 <td>2 min 33%</td>
9016 </tr>
9017
9018 <tr>
9019 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
9020 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
9021 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
9022 <td>4 min 21%</td>
9023 </tr>
9024
9025 </table></p>
9026
9027 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
9028 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
9029 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
9030 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
9031 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
9032 installed.</p>
9033
9034 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
9035 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
9036 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
9037 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
9038 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
9039 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
9040 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
9041 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
9042 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
9043 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
9044 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
9045 for the entire installation.</p>
9046
9047 <p>I've implemented this in the
9048 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
9049 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
9050 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
9051 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
9052 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
9053
9054 <p><blockquote><pre>
9055 #!/bin/sh
9056 set -e
9057 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
9058 info() {
9059     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
9060 }
9061 error() {
9062     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
9063 }
9064 override_install() {
9065     apt-install eatmydata || true
9066     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
9067         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
9068             file=/usr/bin/$bin
9069             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
9070             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
9071                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
9072                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
9073                     > /target$file.edu
9074                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
9075                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
9076                     --rename --quiet --add $file
9077                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
9078             else
9079                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
9080             fi
9081         done
9082     else
9083         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
9084     fi
9085 }
9086
9087 override_install
9088 </pre></blockquote></p>
9089
9090 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
9091 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
9092
9093 <p><blockquote><pre>
9094 #! /bin/sh -e
9095 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
9096 error() {
9097     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
9098 }
9099 remove_install_override() {
9100     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
9101         file=/usr/bin/$bin
9102         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
9103             rm /target$file
9104             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
9105                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
9106             rm /target$file.edu
9107         else
9108             error "Missing divert for $file."
9109         fi
9110     done
9111     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
9112 }
9113
9114 remove_install_override
9115 </pre></blockquote></p>
9116
9117 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
9118 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
9119 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
9120
9121 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
9122 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
9123 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
9124 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
9125 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
9126 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
9127 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
9128 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
9129 everyone.</p>
9130
9131 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
9132 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
9133 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
9134 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
9135
9136 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
9137 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
9138 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
9139 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
9140 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
9141
9142 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
9143 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
9144 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
9145 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
9146 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
9147
9148       </div>
9149       <div class="tags">
9150
9151
9152         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9153
9154
9155       </div>
9156     </div>
9157     <div class="padding"></div>
9158
9159     <div class="entry">
9160       <div class="title">
9161         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
9162       </div>
9163       <div class="date">
9164         10th September 2014
9165       </div>
9166       <div class="body">
9167         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
9168 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
9169 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
9170 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
9171 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
9172 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
9173 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
9174 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
9175 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
9176 those problems are gone now.</p>
9177
9178 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
9179 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
9180 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
9181 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
9182 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
9183
9184 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
9185 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
9186 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
9187
9188 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
9189 line:</p>
9190
9191 <p><blockquote><pre>
9192 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
9193 </pre></blockquote></p>
9194
9195 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
9196 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
9197 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
9198 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
9199
9200 <p><blockquote><pre>
9201 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
9202 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
9203 %
9204 </pre></blockquote></p>
9205
9206 <p>Now if only
9207 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
9208 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
9209 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
9210 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
9211 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
9212 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
9213 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
9214 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
9215 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
9216
9217       </div>
9218       <div class="tags">
9219
9220
9221         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9222
9223
9224       </div>
9225     </div>
9226     <div class="padding"></div>
9227
9228     <div class="entry">
9229       <div class="title">
9230         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
9231       </div>
9232       <div class="date">
9233         17th June 2014
9234       </div>
9235       <div class="body">
9236         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9237 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
9238 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
9239 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
9240 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
9241
9242 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
9243 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
9244 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
9245 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
9246 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
9247 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
9248 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
9249 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
9250 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
9251 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
9252 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
9253 goals.</p>
9254
9255 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
9256 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
9257 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
9258 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
9259 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
9260 chapters together into one large web page (aka
9261 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
9262 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
9263 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
9264 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
9265 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
9266 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
9267 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
9268 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
9269 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
9270 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
9271 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
9272 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
9273 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
9274 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
9275 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
9276 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
9277 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
9278 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
9279
9280 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
9281 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
9282 track the English original.  For this we use the
9283 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
9284 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
9285 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
9286 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
9287 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
9288 files), which the translations update with the native language
9289 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
9290 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
9291 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
9292 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
9293 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
9294 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
9295 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
9296 of the documentation.</p>
9297
9298 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
9299 recommend using
9300 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
9301 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
9302 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
9303 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
9304 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
9305 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
9306 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
9307 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
9308
9309 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
9310 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
9311 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
9312 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
9313 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
9314 translated images by storing translated versions in
9315 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
9316 package maintainers know more.</p>
9317
9318 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
9319 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
9320 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
9321 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
9322 PDF version</a> or the
9323 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
9324 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
9325 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
9326
9327 <p>To learn more, check out
9328 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
9329 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
9330 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
9331 manual on the wiki</a> and
9332 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
9333 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
9334
9335       </div>
9336       <div class="tags">
9337
9338
9339         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9340
9341
9342       </div>
9343     </div>
9344     <div class="padding"></div>
9345
9346     <div class="entry">
9347       <div class="title">
9348         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
9349       </div>
9350       <div class="date">
9351         23rd April 2014
9352       </div>
9353       <div class="body">
9354         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
9355 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
9356 So I implemented one, using
9357 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
9358 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
9359 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
9360 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
9361 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
9362 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
9363
9364 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
9365 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
9366 packages to install.  The first part is in
9367 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
9368 this:</p>
9369
9370 <p><blockquote><pre>
9371 Task: isenkram
9372 Section: hardware
9373 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
9374  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
9375  proposed.
9376 Test-new-install: mark show
9377 Relevance: 8
9378 Packages: for-current-hardware
9379 </pre></blockquote></p>
9380
9381 <p>The second part is in
9382 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
9383 this:</p>
9384
9385 <p><blockquote><pre>
9386 #!/bin/sh
9387 #
9388 (
9389     isenkram-lookup
9390     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
9391 ) | sort -u
9392 </pre></blockquote></p>
9393
9394 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
9395 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
9396 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
9397 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
9398 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
9399 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
9400
9401 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
9402 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
9403 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
9404 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
9405 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
9406 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
9407 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
9408 the python-apt code (bug
9409 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
9410 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
9411 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
9412 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
9413 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
9414 unstable today.</p>
9415
9416 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
9417 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
9418 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
9419 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
9420 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
9421 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
9422 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
9423 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
9424 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
9425
9426 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
9427 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
9428 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
9429 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
9430 package.  See also
9431 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
9432 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
9433 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
9434 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
9435
9436       </div>
9437       <div class="tags">
9438
9439
9440         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
9441
9442
9443       </div>
9444     </div>
9445     <div class="padding"></div>
9446
9447     <div class="entry">
9448       <div class="title">
9449         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
9450       </div>
9451       <div class="date">
9452         15th April 2014
9453       </div>
9454       <div class="body">
9455         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9456 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
9457 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
9458 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
9459 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
9460 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
9461
9462 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
9463 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
9464 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
9465 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
9466 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
9467 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
9468 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
9469
9470 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
9471 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
9472 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
9473 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
9474 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
9475 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
9476 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
9477 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
9478 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
9479 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
9480 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
9481 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
9482
9483 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
9484 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
9485 become root:</p>
9486
9487 <p><pre>
9488 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9489   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9490   u-boot-tools
9491 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9492   freedom-maker
9493 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9494 </pre></p>
9495
9496 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9497 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
9498 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
9499 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
9500 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
9501 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
9502 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
9503 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
9504
9505 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9506 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9507 the preseed values:</p>
9508
9509 <p><pre>
9510 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
9511 </pre></p>
9512
9513 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
9514 it still work.</p>
9515
9516 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
9517 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
9518 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
9519 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
9520 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
9521 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
9522 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
9523
9524 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9525 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9526 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
9527 irc.debian.org)</a> and
9528 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9529 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9530
9531       </div>
9532       <div class="tags">
9533
9534
9535         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9536
9537
9538       </div>
9539     </div>
9540     <div class="padding"></div>
9541
9542     <div class="entry">
9543       <div class="title">
9544         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
9545       </div>
9546       <div class="date">
9547          9th April 2014
9548       </div>
9549       <div class="body">
9550         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
9551 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
9552 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
9553 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
9554 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
9555 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
9556 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
9557 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
9558 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
9559 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
9560 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
9561 have looked at a system called
9562 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
9563 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
9564
9565 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
9566 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
9567 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
9568 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
9569 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
9570 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
9571 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
9572 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
9573 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
9574 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
9575 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
9576 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
9577 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
9578
9579 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
9580 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
9581 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
9582 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
9583 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
9584 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
9585 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
9586 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
9587 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
9588 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
9589 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
9590 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
9591 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
9592 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
9593 account.</p>
9594
9595 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
9596 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
9597 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
9598 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
9599 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
9600 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
9601 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
9602
9603 <p><blockquote><pre>
9604 [s3c]
9605 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9606 backend-login: API-login
9607 backend-password: API-password
9608 fs-passphrase: local-password
9609 </pre></blockquote></p>
9610
9611 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
9612 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
9613 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
9614 details and password to create it:</p>
9615
9616 <p><blockquote><pre>
9617 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
9618 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9619   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9620 Enter backend login:
9621 Enter backend password:
9622 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
9623 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
9624 Enter encryption password:
9625 Confirm encryption password:
9626 Generating random encryption key...
9627 Creating metadata tables...
9628 Dumping metadata...
9629 ..objects..
9630 ..blocks..
9631 ..inodes..
9632 ..inode_blocks..
9633 ..symlink_targets..
9634 ..names..
9635 ..contents..
9636 ..ext_attributes..
9637 Compressing and uploading metadata...
9638 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
9639 # </pre></blockquote></p>
9640
9641 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
9642
9643 <p><blockquote><pre>
9644 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9645   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
9646 Using 4 upload threads.
9647 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
9648 Reading metadata...
9649 ..objects..
9650 ..blocks..
9651 ..inodes..
9652 ..inode_blocks..
9653 ..symlink_targets..
9654 ..names..
9655 ..contents..
9656 ..ext_attributes..
9657 Mounting filesystem...
9658 # df -h /s3ql
9659 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
9660 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
9661 #
9662 </pre></blockquote></p>
9663
9664 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
9665 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
9666 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
9667 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
9668 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
9669 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
9670
9671 <p><blockquote><pre>
9672 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
9673 #
9674 </pre></blockquote></p>
9675
9676 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
9677 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
9678 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
9679 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
9680 file system:</p>
9681
9682 <p><blockquote><pre>
9683 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9684 Using cached metadata.
9685 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
9686 Checking DB integrity...
9687 Creating temporary extra indices...
9688 Checking lost+found...
9689 Checking cached objects...
9690 Checking names (refcounts)...
9691 Checking contents (names)...
9692 Checking contents (inodes)...
9693 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
9694 Checking objects (reference counts)...
9695 Checking objects (backend)...
9696 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
9697 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
9698 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
9699 Checking objects (sizes)...
9700 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
9701 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
9702 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
9703 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
9704 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
9705 Checking inodes (sizes)...
9706 Checking extended attributes (names)...
9707 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
9708 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
9709 Checking directory reachability...
9710 Checking unix conventions...
9711 Checking referential integrity...
9712 Dropping temporary indices...
9713 Backing up old metadata...
9714 Dumping metadata...
9715 ..objects..
9716 ..blocks..
9717 ..inodes..
9718 ..inode_blocks..
9719 ..symlink_targets..
9720 ..names..
9721 ..contents..
9722 ..ext_attributes..
9723 Compressing and uploading metadata...
9724 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
9725 #
9726 </pre></blockquote></p>
9727
9728 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
9729 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
9730 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
9731 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
9732 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
9733 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
9734 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
9735 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
9736 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
9737 working set.</p>
9738
9739 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
9740 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
9741 busy:</p>
9742
9743 <p><blockquote><pre>
9744 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9745   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
9746 Using 8 upload threads.
9747 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
9748 #
9749 </pre></blockquote></p>
9750
9751 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
9752 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
9753 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
9754 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
9755 s3qlctrl:
9756
9757 <p><blockquote><pre>
9758 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
9759 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
9760 #
9761 </pre></blockquote></p>
9762
9763 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
9764 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
9765 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
9766 a report:</p>
9767
9768 <p><blockquote><pre>
9769 # s3qlstat /s3ql
9770 Directory entries:    9141
9771 Inodes:               9143
9772 Data blocks:          8851
9773 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
9774 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
9775 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
9776 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
9777 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
9778 #
9779 </pre></blockquote></p>
9780
9781 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
9782 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
9783 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
9784 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
9785 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
9786 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
9787 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
9788 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
9789 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
9790 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
9791 best.</p>
9792
9793 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
9794 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
9795 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
9796 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
9797 poster is titled
9798 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
9799 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
9800 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
9801 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
9802 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
9803
9804 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
9805 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
9806 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
9807 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
9808 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
9809 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
9810 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
9811 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
9812
9813 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
9814 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
9815 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
9816 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
9817 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
9818 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
9819 only read from it.</p>
9820
9821 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9822 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9823 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9824
9825       </div>
9826       <div class="tags">
9827
9828
9829         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9830
9831
9832       </div>
9833     </div>
9834     <div class="padding"></div>
9835
9836     <div class="entry">
9837       <div class="title">
9838         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
9839       </div>
9840       <div class="date">
9841         14th March 2014
9842       </div>
9843       <div class="body">
9844         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9845 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
9846 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
9847 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
9848 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
9849 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
9850 release (0.2).</p>
9851
9852 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
9853 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
9854 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
9855 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
9856 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
9857 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
9858 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
9859 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
9860 and build using
9861 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
9862 with a user with sudo access to become root:
9863
9864 <pre>
9865 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9866   freedom-maker
9867 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9868   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9869   u-boot-tools
9870 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9871 </pre>
9872
9873 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9874 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
9875 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
9876 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
9877 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
9878 kpartx call.</p>
9879
9880 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9881 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9882 the preseed values:</p>
9883
9884 <pre>
9885 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
9886 </pre>
9887
9888 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
9889 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
9890 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
9891 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
9892 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
9893 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
9894
9895 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9896 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9897 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
9898 irc.debian.org)</a> and
9899 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9900 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9901
9902       </div>
9903       <div class="tags">
9904
9905
9906         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9907
9908
9909       </div>
9910     </div>
9911     <div class="padding"></div>
9912
9913     <div class="entry">
9914       <div class="title">
9915         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
9916       </div>
9917       <div class="date">
9918         22nd February 2014
9919       </div>
9920       <div class="body">
9921         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
9922 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
9923 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
9924 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
9925 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
9926 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
9927 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
9928 proper home since then.</p>
9929
9930 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
9931 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
9932 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
9933 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
9934 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
9935
9936 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
9937 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
9938 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
9939 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
9940 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
9941 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
9942 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
9943 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
9944 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
9945
9946       </div>
9947       <div class="tags">
9948
9949
9950         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9951
9952
9953       </div>
9954     </div>
9955     <div class="padding"></div>
9956
9957     <div class="entry">
9958       <div class="title">
9959         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
9960       </div>
9961       <div class="date">
9962          3rd February 2014
9963       </div>
9964       <div class="body">
9965         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
9966 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
9967 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
9968 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
9969 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
9970 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
9971 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
9972 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
9973 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
9974
9975 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
9976 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
9977 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
9978 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
9979 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
9980 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
9981
9982 <p><blockquote><pre>
9983 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
9984 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
9985 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
9986 dhclient /dev/eth0
9987 </pre></blockquote></p>
9988
9989 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
9990 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
9991 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
9992
9993 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
9994 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
9995 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
9996 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
9997 side.</p>
9998
9999 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
10000 stuff:</p>
10001
10002 <p><blockquote><pre>
10003 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10004 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
10005 EOF
10006 apt-get update
10007 apt-get dist-upgrade
10008 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
10009     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
10010 update-alternatives --config runsystem
10011 </pre></blockquote></p>
10012
10013 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
10014 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
10015 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
10016 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
10017 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
10018 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
10019 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
10020 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
10021 ssh instead.
10022
10023 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
10024 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
10025 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
10026 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
10027 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
10028 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
10029
10030 <p><blockquote><pre>
10031 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10032 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
10033 EOF
10034 </pre></blockquote></p>
10035
10036 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
10037 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
10038 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
10039 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
10040
10041 <p><blockquote><pre>
10042 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
10043 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
10044 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
10045 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
10046 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
10047 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
10048 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
10049 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
10050 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
10051 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
10052 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
10053 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
10054 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
10055 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
10056 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
10057 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
10058 #
10059 </pre></blockquote></p>
10060
10061 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
10062 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
10063 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
10064 command line stuff.<p>
10065
10066       </div>
10067       <div class="tags">
10068
10069
10070         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10071
10072
10073       </div>
10074     </div>
10075     <div class="padding"></div>
10076
10077     <div class="entry">
10078       <div class="title">
10079         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
10080       </div>
10081       <div class="date">
10082         14th January 2014
10083       </div>
10084       <div class="body">
10085         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
10086 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
10087 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
10088 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
10089 the source.  The company behind it provide
10090 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
10091 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
10092 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
10093 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
10094 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
10095 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
10096 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
10097 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
10098 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
10099 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
10100 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
10101 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
10102 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
10103 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
10104 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
10105 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
10106 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
10107 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
10108 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
10109
10110 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
10111
10112 <ul>
10113
10114   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
10115   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
10116   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
10117
10118 </ul>
10119
10120 <p>You can
10121 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
10122 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
10123 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
10124 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10125 include a test suite check.</p>
10126
10127       </div>
10128       <div class="tags">
10129
10130
10131         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10132
10133
10134       </div>
10135     </div>
10136     <div class="padding"></div>
10137
10138     <div class="entry">
10139       <div class="title">
10140         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
10141       </div>
10142       <div class="date">
10143         24th November 2013
10144       </div>
10145       <div class="body">
10146         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
10147 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
10148 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
10149 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
10150 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
10151 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
10152 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
10153 is working on.  I checked the
10154 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
10155 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
10156 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
10157 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
10158 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
10159 These are the release notes:</p>
10160
10161 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
10162
10163 <ul>
10164
10165   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
10166    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
10167    up.</li>
10168
10169   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
10170
10171   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
10172    Matthias Klose.</li>
10173
10174   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
10175    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
10176
10177   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
10178    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
10179    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
10180
10181 </ul>
10182
10183 <p>You can
10184 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
10185 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
10186 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
10187 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10188 include a testsuite check.</p>
10189
10190       </div>
10191       <div class="tags">
10192
10193
10194         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10195
10196
10197       </div>
10198     </div>
10199     <div class="padding"></div>
10200
10201     <div class="entry">
10202       <div class="title">
10203         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
10204       </div>
10205       <div class="date">
10206          2nd November 2013
10207       </div>
10208       <div class="body">
10209         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
10210 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
10211 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
10212 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
10213 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
10214
10215 <p><pre>
10216 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
10217 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
10218 # Provides:          rsyslog
10219 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
10220 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
10221 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
10222 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
10223 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
10224 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
10225 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
10226 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
10227 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
10228 ### END INIT INFO
10229 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
10230 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
10231 </pre></p>
10232
10233 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
10234 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
10235 info/comments.</p>
10236
10237 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
10238 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
10239
10240 <p><pre>
10241 #!/bin/sh
10242
10243 # Define LSB log_* functions.
10244 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
10245 # and status_of_proc is working.
10246 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
10247
10248 #
10249 # Function that starts the daemon/service
10250
10251 #
10252 do_start()
10253 {
10254         # Return
10255         #   0 if daemon has been started
10256         #   1 if daemon was already running
10257         #   2 if daemon could not be started
10258         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
10259                 || return 1
10260         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
10261                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
10262                 || return 2
10263         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
10264         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
10265         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
10266 }
10267
10268 #
10269 # Function that stops the daemon/service
10270 #
10271 do_stop()
10272 {
10273         # Return
10274         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
10275         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
10276         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
10277         #   other if a failure occurred
10278         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
10279         RETVAL="$?"
10280         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
10281         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
10282         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
10283         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
10284         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
10285         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
10286         # sleep for some time.
10287         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
10288         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
10289         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
10290         rm -f $PIDFILE
10291         return "$RETVAL"
10292 }
10293
10294 #
10295 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
10296 #
10297 do_reload() {
10298         #
10299         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
10300         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
10301         # then implement that here.
10302         #
10303         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
10304         return 0
10305 }
10306
10307 SCRIPTNAME=$1
10308 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
10309 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
10310 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
10311     script="$1"
10312     shift
10313     . $script
10314 else
10315     exit 0
10316 fi
10317
10318 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
10319 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
10320
10321 # Exit if the package is not installed
10322 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
10323
10324 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
10325 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
10326
10327 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
10328 . /lib/init/vars.sh
10329
10330 case "$1" in
10331   start)
10332         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
10333         do_start
10334         case "$?" in
10335                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
10336                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
10337         esac
10338         ;;
10339   stop)
10340         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
10341         do_stop
10342         case "$?" in
10343                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
10344                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
10345         esac
10346         ;;
10347   status)
10348         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
10349         ;;
10350   #reload|force-reload)
10351         #
10352         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
10353         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
10354         #
10355         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
10356         #do_reload
10357         #log_end_msg $?
10358         #;;
10359   restart|force-reload)
10360         #
10361         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
10362         # 'force-reload' alias
10363         #
10364         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
10365         do_stop
10366         case "$?" in
10367           0|1)
10368                 do_start
10369                 case "$?" in
10370                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
10371                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
10372                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
10373                 esac
10374                 ;;
10375           *)
10376                 # Failed to stop
10377                 log_end_msg 1
10378                 ;;
10379         esac
10380         ;;
10381   *)
10382         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
10383         exit 3
10384         ;;
10385 esac
10386
10387 :
10388 </pre></p>
10389
10390 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
10391 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
10392 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
10393 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
10394
10395 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
10396 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
10397 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
10398 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
10399 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
10400
10401       </div>
10402       <div class="tags">
10403
10404
10405         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10406
10407
10408       </div>
10409     </div>
10410     <div class="padding"></div>
10411
10412     <div class="entry">
10413       <div class="title">
10414         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
10415       </div>
10416       <div class="date">
10417          1st November 2013
10418       </div>
10419       <div class="body">
10420         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
10421 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
10422 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
10423 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
10424 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
10425 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
10426 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
10427 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
10428 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
10429 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
10430 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
10431 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
10432
10433 <p>The source is now available from
10434 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
10435
10436       </div>
10437       <div class="tags">
10438
10439
10440         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10441
10442
10443       </div>
10444     </div>
10445     <div class="padding"></div>
10446
10447     <div class="entry">
10448       <div class="title">
10449         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
10450       </div>
10451       <div class="date">
10452         27th October 2013
10453       </div>
10454       <div class="body">
10455         <p>The
10456 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
10457 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
10458 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
10459 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
10460 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
10461 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
10462 of a plan to simplify the build system for
10463 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
10464 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
10465 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
10466 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
10467 Raspberry Pi.</p>
10468
10469 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
10470 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
10471 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
10472 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
10473 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
10474 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
10475 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
10476 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
10477 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
10478 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
10479 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
10480 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
10481 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
10482 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
10483 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
10484 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
10485 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
10486 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
10487 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
10488 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
10489 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
10490 available from
10491 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
10492 upstream project page</a>.</p>
10493
10494 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
10495 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
10496 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
10497 list:</p>
10498
10499 <p><pre>
10500 #!/bin/sh
10501 set -e # Exit on first error
10502 rootdir="$1"
10503 cd "$rootdir"
10504 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
10505 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
10506 EOF
10507 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
10508 # install a kernel somewhere too.
10509 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
10510     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
10511 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
10512 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
10513 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
10514 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
10515 </pre></p>
10516
10517 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
10518 to build the image:</p>
10519
10520 <pre>
10521 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
10522     --variant minbase \
10523     --arch armel \
10524     --distribution jessie \
10525     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
10526     --image test.img \
10527     --size 600M \
10528     --bootsize 64M \
10529     --boottype vfat \
10530     --log-level debug \
10531     --verbose \
10532     --no-kernel \
10533     --no-extlinux \
10534     --root-password raspberry \
10535     --hostname raspberrypi \
10536     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
10537     --customize `pwd`/customize \
10538     --package netbase \
10539     --package git-core \
10540     --package binutils \
10541     --package ca-certificates \
10542     --package wget \
10543     --package kmod
10544 </pre></p>
10545
10546 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
10547 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
10548 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
10549 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
10550 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
10551 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
10552 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
10553
10554 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
10555 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
10556 build dependency list.</p>
10557
10558 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
10559 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
10560 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
10561 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
10562
10563       </div>
10564       <div class="tags">
10565
10566
10567         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
10568
10569
10570       </div>
10571     </div>
10572     <div class="padding"></div>
10573
10574     <div class="entry">
10575       <div class="title">
10576         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
10577       </div>
10578       <div class="date">
10579         15th October 2013
10580       </div>
10581       <div class="body">
10582         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
10583 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
10584 these. :)</p>
10585
10586 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
10587 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
10588 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
10589 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
10590 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
10591 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
10592 hope you will to. :)</p>
10593
10594 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
10595 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
10596 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
10597 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
10598 donated.  Are you next?</p>
10599
10600 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
10601 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
10602 statement under the heading
10603 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
10604 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
10605 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
10606 too.</p>
10607
10608       </div>
10609       <div class="tags">
10610
10611
10612         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
10613
10614
10615       </div>
10616     </div>
10617     <div class="padding"></div>
10618
10619     <div class="entry">
10620       <div class="title">
10621         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
10622       </div>
10623       <div class="date">
10624         27th September 2013
10625       </div>
10626       <div class="body">
10627         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
10628 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
10629 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
10630 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
10631
10632 <ul>
10633
10634 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
10635 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
10636
10637 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
10638 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
10639
10640 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
10641 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
10642 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
10643 (Youtube)</li>
10644
10645 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
10646 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
10647
10648 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
10649 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
10650
10651 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
10652 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
10653 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
10654
10655 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
10656 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
10657 (Youtube)</li>
10658
10659 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
10660 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
10661
10662 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
10663 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
10664
10665 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
10666 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
10667 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
10668
10669 </ul>
10670
10671 <p>A larger list is available from
10672 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
10673 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
10674
10675 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
10676 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
10677 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
10678 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
10679 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
10680 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
10681 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
10682 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
10683 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
10684 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
10685 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
10686
10687       </div>
10688       <div class="tags">
10689
10690
10691         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10692
10693
10694       </div>
10695     </div>
10696     <div class="padding"></div>
10697
10698     <div class="entry">
10699       <div class="title">
10700         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
10701       </div>
10702       <div class="date">
10703         10th September 2013
10704       </div>
10705       <div class="body">
10706         <p>I was introduced to the
10707 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
10708 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
10709 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
10710 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
10711 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
10712 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
10713 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
10714 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
10715
10716 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
10717 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
10718 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
10719 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
10720 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
10721
10722 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
10723 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
10724 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
10725 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
10726 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
10727 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
10728 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
10729 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
10730 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
10731 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
10732 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
10733 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
10734 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
10735 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
10736 missing in Debian).</p>
10737
10738 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
10739 scripts
10740 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
10741 and a administrative web interface
10742 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
10743 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
10744 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
10745 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
10746 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
10747 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
10748 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
10749 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
10750 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
10751 this is really working yet, see
10752 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
10753 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
10754 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
10755 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
10756 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
10757 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
10758 with lots of half baked features.</p>
10759
10760 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
10761 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
10762 at.</p>
10763
10764 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
10765
10766 <ol>
10767
10768 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
10769 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
10770 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
10771 to the Debian installer:<p>
10772 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
10773
10774 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
10775 install on.</li>
10776
10777 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
10778 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
10779
10780 </ol>
10781
10782 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
10783
10784 <ol>
10785
10786 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
10787 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
10788 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
10789 <pre>
10790 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
10791 </pre></li>
10792 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
10793 <pre>
10794 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
10795    apt-key add -
10796 apt-get update
10797 apt-get install freedombox-setup
10798 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
10799 </pre></li>
10800 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
10801
10802 </ol>
10803
10804 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
10805 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
10806 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
10807 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
10808 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
10809
10810 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
10811 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
10812 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
10813 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
10814
10815 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
10816 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
10817 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
10818 irc.debian.org and the
10819 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
10820 mailing list</a>.</p>
10821
10822 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
10823 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
10824 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
10825 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
10826 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
10827 default password is 'secret'.</p>
10828
10829       </div>
10830       <div class="tags">
10831
10832
10833         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10834
10835
10836       </div>
10837     </div>
10838     <div class="padding"></div>
10839
10840     <div class="entry">
10841       <div class="title">
10842         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
10843       </div>
10844       <div class="date">
10845         18th August 2013
10846       </div>
10847       <div class="body">
10848         <p>Earlier, I reported about
10849 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
10850 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
10851 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
10852 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
10853 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
10854 currently on the disk.</p>
10855
10856 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
10857 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
10858 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
10859 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
10860 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
10861 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
10862 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
10863 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
10864 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
10865 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
10866 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
10867 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
10868 the broken disks.</p>
10869
10870       </div>
10871       <div class="tags">
10872
10873
10874         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10875
10876
10877       </div>
10878     </div>
10879     <div class="padding"></div>
10880
10881     <div class="entry">
10882       <div class="title">
10883         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
10884       </div>
10885       <div class="date">
10886         17th July 2013
10887       </div>
10888       <div class="body">
10889         <p>Today I switched to
10890 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
10891 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
10892 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
10893 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
10894 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
10895 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
10896 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
10897 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
10898 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
10899 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
10900 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
10901 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
10902 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
10903 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
10904 station from now on.</p>
10905
10906 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
10907 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
10908 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
10909 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
10910 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
10911 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
10912 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
10913 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
10914 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
10915 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
10916 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
10917 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
10918
10919 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
10920 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
10921 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
10922 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
10923 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
10924 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
10925 parameters are tuned:</p>
10926
10927 <ul>
10928
10929 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
10930     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
10931
10932 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
10933     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
10934     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
10935
10936 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
10937     systems.</li>
10938
10939 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
10940     /etc/fstab.</li>
10941
10942 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
10943
10944 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
10945     cron.daily).</li>
10946
10947 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
10948     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
10949
10950 </ul>
10951
10952 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
10953 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
10954 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
10955 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
10956 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
10957 from getting the data on the disk (see
10958 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
10959 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
10960 right thing to do.</p>
10961
10962 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
10963 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
10964 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
10965
10966 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
10967 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
10968 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
10969 instead of during my work.</p>
10970
10971 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
10972 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
10973
10974 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
10975 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
10976 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
10977
10978 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
10979 there.</p>
10980
10981 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
10982 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
10983 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
10984 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
10985 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
10986 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
10987 back.</p>
10988
10989       </div>
10990       <div class="tags">
10991
10992
10993         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10994
10995
10996       </div>
10997     </div>
10998     <div class="padding"></div>
10999
11000     <div class="entry">
11001       <div class="title">
11002         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
11003       </div>
11004       <div class="date">
11005         10th July 2013
11006       </div>
11007       <div class="body">
11008         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
11009 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
11010 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
11011 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
11012 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
11013 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
11014 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
11015 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
11016
11017 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
11018 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
11019 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
11020 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
11021 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
11022 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
11023 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
11024 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
11025 lock up when I download a new
11026 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
11027 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
11028 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
11029
11030 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
11031 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
11032 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
11033 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
11034 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
11035 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
11036
11037 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
11038 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
11039 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
11040 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
11041 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
11042 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
11043
11044 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
11045 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
11046 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
11047 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
11048 exist).</p>
11049
11050       </div>
11051       <div class="tags">
11052
11053
11054         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11055
11056
11057       </div>
11058     </div>
11059     <div class="padding"></div>
11060
11061     <div class="entry">
11062       <div class="title">
11063         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
11064       </div>
11065       <div class="date">
11066          9th July 2013
11067       </div>
11068       <div class="body">
11069         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
11070 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
11071 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
11072 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
11073 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11074 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
11075 Bitraf</a>.</p>
11076
11077 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
11078 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
11079 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
11080 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
11081 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
11082
11083       </div>
11084       <div class="tags">
11085
11086
11087         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11088
11089
11090       </div>
11091     </div>
11092     <div class="padding"></div>
11093
11094     <div class="entry">
11095       <div class="title">
11096         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
11097       </div>
11098       <div class="date">
11099          5th July 2013
11100       </div>
11101       <div class="body">
11102         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
11103 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
11104 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
11105 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
11106 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
11107 ended up picking a
11108 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
11109 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
11110 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
11111 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
11112 on that below.</p>
11113
11114 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
11115 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
11116 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
11117 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
11118 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
11119 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
11120 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
11121 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
11122 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
11123
11124 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
11125 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
11126 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
11127 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
11128 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
11129 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
11130 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
11131
11132 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
11133 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
11134
11135 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
11136 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
11137 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
11138 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
11139 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
11140 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
11141 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
11142 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
11143 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
11144 kernel developers as
11145 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
11146 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
11147 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
11148 Lenovo forums, both for
11149 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
11150 2012-11-10</a> and for
11151 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
11152 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
11153 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
11154 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
11155 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
11156 There is even a
11157 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
11158 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
11159 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
11160
11161 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
11162 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
11163 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
11164 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
11165 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
11166 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
11167 fixed. :)</p>
11168
11169       </div>
11170       <div class="tags">
11171
11172
11173         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11174
11175
11176       </div>
11177     </div>
11178     <div class="padding"></div>
11179
11180     <div class="entry">
11181       <div class="title">
11182         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
11183       </div>
11184       <div class="date">
11185          4th July 2013
11186       </div>
11187       <div class="body">
11188         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
11189 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
11190 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
11191 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
11192 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
11193 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
11194 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
11195 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
11196 with an expencive door stop.</p>
11197
11198 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
11199 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
11200 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
11201 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
11202 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
11203 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
11204 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
11205
11206 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
11207 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
11208 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
11209 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
11210 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
11211 new laptop now. :)</p>
11212
11213 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
11214
11215       </div>
11216       <div class="tags">
11217
11218
11219         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11220
11221
11222       </div>
11223     </div>
11224     <div class="padding"></div>
11225
11226     <div class="entry">
11227       <div class="title">
11228         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
11229       </div>
11230       <div class="date">
11231         25th June 2013
11232       </div>
11233       <div class="body">
11234         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
11235 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
11236 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
11237 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
11238 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
11239 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
11240 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
11241 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
11242 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
11243 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
11244 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
11245
11246 <p><pre>
11247 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
11248 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
11249 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
11250 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
11251 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
11252 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
11253 firmware-ipw2x00
11254 firmware-ipw2x00
11255 Preconfiguring packages ...
11256 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
11257 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
11258 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
11259 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
11260 #
11261 </pre></p>
11262
11263 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
11264 printed instead:</p>
11265
11266 <p><pre>
11267 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
11268 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
11269 #
11270 </pre></p>
11271
11272 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
11273 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
11274
11275 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
11276 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
11277 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
11278 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
11279 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
11280 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
11281 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
11282 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
11283 machine.</p>
11284
11285 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
11286 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
11287 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
11288 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
11289 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
11290 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
11291
11292       </div>
11293       <div class="tags">
11294
11295
11296         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
11297
11298
11299       </div>
11300     </div>
11301     <div class="padding"></div>
11302
11303     <div class="entry">
11304       <div class="title">
11305         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
11306       </div>
11307       <div class="date">
11308         11th June 2013
11309       </div>
11310       <div class="body">
11311         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
11312 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
11313 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
11314 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
11315 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
11316 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
11317 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
11318 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
11319 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
11320 i915 driver used by the
11321 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
11322 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
11323
11324 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
11325 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
11326 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
11327 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
11328 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
11329
11330 <pre>
11331 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
11332 update-initramfs -u -k all
11333 </pre>
11334
11335 <p>Since March 2012 there is
11336 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
11337 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
11338 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
11339 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
11340 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
11341 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
11342 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
11343 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
11344 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
11345 number.</p>
11346
11347 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
11348 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
11349
11350 <p><pre>
11351 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
11352     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
11353     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
11354  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
11355  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
11356     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
11357  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
11358     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
11359  Latency: 0
11360  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
11361  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
11362  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
11363  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
11364  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
11365  Capabilities: <access denied>
11366  Kernel driver in use: i915
11367 </pre></p>
11368
11369 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
11370
11371 <p><pre>
11372 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
11373        ...
11374         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
11375         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
11376        ...
11377 }
11378 </pre></p>
11379
11380 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
11381 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
11382 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
11383 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
11384 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
11385 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
11386 yet shown up in
11387 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
11388 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
11389 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
11390 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
11391 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
11392 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
11393
11394 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
11395 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
11396 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
11397 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
11398 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
11399 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
11400 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
11401 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
11402 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
11403 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
11404 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
11405 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
11406
11407 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
11408 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
11409 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
11410 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
11411 backlight.</p>
11412
11413       </div>
11414       <div class="tags">
11415
11416
11417         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11418
11419
11420       </div>
11421     </div>
11422     <div class="padding"></div>
11423
11424     <div class="entry">
11425       <div class="title">
11426         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
11427       </div>
11428       <div class="date">
11429         27th May 2013
11430       </div>
11431       <div class="body">
11432         <p>Two days ago, I asked
11433 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
11434 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
11435 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
11436 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
11437 and Windows 8.</p>
11438
11439 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
11440 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
11441 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
11442 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
11443 enough to tell.</p>
11444
11445 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
11446 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
11447 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
11448 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
11449 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
11450 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
11451 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
11452 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
11453 to follow.</p>
11454
11455 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
11456 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
11457 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
11458 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
11459 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
11460 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
11461 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
11462 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
11463
11464 <p>I've updated the
11465 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
11466 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
11467 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
11468 machine.</p>
11469
11470 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
11471 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
11472
11473       </div>
11474       <div class="tags">
11475
11476
11477         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11478
11479
11480       </div>
11481     </div>
11482     <div class="padding"></div>
11483
11484     <div class="entry">
11485       <div class="title">
11486         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
11487       </div>
11488       <div class="date">
11489         25th May 2013
11490       </div>
11491       <div class="body">
11492         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
11493 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
11494 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
11495 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
11496 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
11497 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
11498
11499 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
11500 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
11501 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
11502 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
11503 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
11504 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
11505 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
11506 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
11507 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
11508 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
11509
11510 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
11511 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
11512 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
11513 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
11514 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
11515 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
11516
11517 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
11518 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
11519 on new Laptops?</p>
11520
11521       </div>
11522       <div class="tags">
11523
11524
11525         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11526
11527
11528       </div>
11529     </div>
11530     <div class="padding"></div>
11531
11532     <div class="entry">
11533       <div class="title">
11534         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
11535       </div>
11536       <div class="date">
11537         17th May 2013
11538       </div>
11539       <div class="body">
11540         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
11541 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
11542 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
11543 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
11544 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
11545 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
11546 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
11547 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
11548 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
11549 donate some money</a>.
11550
11551 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
11552 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
11553 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
11554 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
11555 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
11556
11557 <p>The script,
11558 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
11559 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
11560 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
11561 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
11562
11563 <ol>
11564
11565 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
11566 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
11567 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
11568     our configuration.</li>
11569 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
11570     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
11571     according to the profile specified in the config above,
11572     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
11573 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
11574     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
11575 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
11576
11577 </ol>
11578
11579 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
11580 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
11581 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
11582 the needed packages.</p>
11583
11584 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
11585 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
11586 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
11587 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
11588 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
11589 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
11590
11591 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
11592 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
11593 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
11594
11595 <p><pre>
11596 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
11597 DESKTOP="lxde"
11598 </pre></p>
11599
11600 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
11601 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
11602 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
11603 boot.</p>
11604
11605       </div>
11606       <div class="tags">
11607
11608
11609         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11610
11611
11612       </div>
11613     </div>
11614     <div class="padding"></div>
11615
11616     <div class="entry">
11617       <div class="title">
11618         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
11619       </div>
11620       <div class="date">
11621         11th May 2013
11622       </div>
11623       <div class="body">
11624         <P>In January,
11625 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
11626 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
11627 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
11628 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
11629 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
11630 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
11631 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
11632 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
11633 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
11634 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
11635 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
11636 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
11637
11638 <p><table>
11639 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
11640 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
11641 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
11642 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
11643 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
11644 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
11645 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
11646 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
11647 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
11648 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
11649 </table></p>
11650
11651 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
11652 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
11653 available in experimental.</p>
11654
11655 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
11656 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
11657 for LEGO designers.</p>
11658
11659       </div>
11660       <div class="tags">
11661
11662
11663         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
11664
11665
11666       </div>
11667     </div>
11668     <div class="padding"></div>
11669
11670     <div class="entry">
11671       <div class="title">
11672         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
11673       </div>
11674       <div class="date">
11675          5th May 2013
11676       </div>
11677       <div class="body">
11678         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
11679 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
11680 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
11681 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
11682 soon.</p>
11683
11684 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
11685 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
11686 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
11687 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
11688 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
11689 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
11690 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
11691 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
11692 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
11693 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
11694 Edu.</a>
11695
11696 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
11697 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
11698 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
11699 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
11700 follow.<p>
11701
11702       </div>
11703       <div class="tags">
11704
11705
11706         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11707
11708
11709       </div>
11710     </div>
11711     <div class="padding"></div>
11712
11713     <div class="entry">
11714       <div class="title">
11715         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
11716       </div>
11717       <div class="date">
11718          3rd April 2013
11719       </div>
11720       <div class="body">
11721         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
11722 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
11723 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
11724 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
11725
11726 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
11727 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
11728 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
11729 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
11730 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
11731 BTS. :)</p>
11732
11733       </div>
11734       <div class="tags">
11735
11736
11737         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
11738
11739
11740       </div>
11741     </div>
11742     <div class="padding"></div>
11743
11744     <div class="entry">
11745       <div class="title">
11746         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
11747       </div>
11748       <div class="date">
11749          2nd February 2013
11750       </div>
11751       <div class="body">
11752         <p>My
11753 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
11754 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
11755 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
11756 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
11757 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
11758 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
11759 version too.</p>
11760
11761 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
11762 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
11763 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
11764 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
11765 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
11766 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
11767 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
11768 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
11769
11770 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
11771 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
11772 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
11773 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
11774 it. :)</p>
11775
11776 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11777 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11778 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11779
11780       </div>
11781       <div class="tags">
11782
11783
11784         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11785
11786
11787       </div>
11788     </div>
11789     <div class="padding"></div>
11790
11791     <div class="entry">
11792       <div class="title">
11793         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
11794       </div>
11795       <div class="date">
11796         22nd January 2013
11797       </div>
11798       <div class="body">
11799         <p>Yesterday, I
11800 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
11801 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
11802 pluggable hardware devices, which I
11803 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
11804 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
11805 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
11806 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
11807 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
11808 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
11809 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
11810 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
11811 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
11812 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
11813
11814 <pre>
11815 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
11816 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
11817 </pre>
11818
11819 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
11820 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
11821 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
11822 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
11823
11824 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
11825 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
11826 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
11827 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
11828 word.</p>
11829
11830 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
11831 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
11832 process.</p>
11833
11834 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
11835 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
11836
11837       </div>
11838       <div class="tags">
11839
11840
11841         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
11842
11843
11844       </div>
11845     </div>
11846     <div class="padding"></div>
11847
11848     <div class="entry">
11849       <div class="title">
11850         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
11851       </div>
11852       <div class="date">
11853         21st January 2013
11854       </div>
11855       <div class="body">
11856         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
11857 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
11858 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
11859 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
11860 it, fetch the
11861 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
11862 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
11863 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
11864 autostart script.</p>
11865
11866 <p>The design is simple:</p>
11867
11868 <ul>
11869
11870 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
11871 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
11872
11873 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
11874 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
11875 initially did.</li>
11876
11877 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
11878 the APT database, a database
11879 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
11880 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
11881
11882 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
11883 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
11884 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
11885 package or packages.</li>
11886
11887 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
11888 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
11889
11890 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
11891 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
11892
11893 </ul>
11894
11895 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
11896 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
11897 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
11898 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
11899
11900 <p><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
11901 <br><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
11902 <br><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
11903 <br><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
11904 <br><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
11905
11906 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
11907 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
11908 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
11909 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
11910 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
11911 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
11912 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
11913 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
11914
11915 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
11916 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
11917 '<tt>svn checkout
11918 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
11919 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
11920 devscripts package.</p>
11921
11922 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
11923 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
11924 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
11925 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
11926 instructions</a> for details.</p>
11927
11928       </div>
11929       <div class="tags">
11930
11931
11932         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
11933
11934
11935       </div>
11936     </div>
11937     <div class="padding"></div>
11938
11939     <div class="entry">
11940       <div class="title">
11941         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
11942       </div>
11943       <div class="date">
11944         19th January 2013
11945       </div>
11946       <div class="body">
11947         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
11948 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
11949 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
11950 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
11951 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
11952 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
11953 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
11954 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
11955 not a durable solution.
11956
11957 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
11958 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
11959
11960 <ul>
11961
11962 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
11963   than A4).</li>
11964 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
11965 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
11966 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
11967 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
11968 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
11969 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
11970 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
11971 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
11972 size).</li>
11973 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
11974   X.org packages.</li>
11975 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
11976   the time).
11977
11978 </ul>
11979
11980 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
11981 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
11982 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
11983 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
11984 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
11985 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
11986 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
11987 still be useful.</p>
11988
11989 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
11990 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
11991 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
11992 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
11993 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
11994 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
11995
11996       </div>
11997       <div class="tags">
11998
11999
12000         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12001
12002
12003       </div>
12004     </div>
12005     <div class="padding"></div>
12006
12007     <div class="entry">
12008       <div class="title">
12009         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
12010       </div>
12011       <div class="date">
12012         18th January 2013
12013       </div>
12014       <div class="body">
12015         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
12016 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
12017 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
12018 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
12019 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
12020 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
12021 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
12022
12023 <pre>
12024 #!/usr/bin/python
12025 import sys
12026 import apt
12027 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
12028     cache = apt.Cache()
12029     cache.open(None)
12030     thepkgs = []
12031     for pkg in cache:
12032         version = pkg.candidate
12033         if version is None:
12034             version = pkg.installed
12035         if version is None:
12036             continue
12037         record = version.record
12038         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
12039             continue
12040         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
12041         for t in mime_types:
12042             t = t.rstrip().strip()
12043             if t == mimetype:
12044                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
12045     return thepkgs
12046 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
12047 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
12048     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
12049 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
12050 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
12051     print "  %s" %pkg
12052 </pre>
12053
12054 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
12055
12056 <pre>
12057 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
12058 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
12059   gecko-mediaplayer
12060 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
12061 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
12062   browser-plugin-gnash
12063 %
12064 </pre>
12065
12066 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
12067 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
12068 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
12069 anyone working on adding it?</p>
12070
12071 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
12072 request for icweasel support for this feature is
12073 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
12074 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
12075 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
12076 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
12077
12078       </div>
12079       <div class="tags">
12080
12081
12082         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12083
12084
12085       </div>
12086     </div>
12087     <div class="padding"></div>
12088
12089     <div class="entry">
12090       <div class="title">
12091         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
12092       </div>
12093       <div class="date">
12094         16th January 2013
12095       </div>
12096       <div class="body">
12097         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
12098 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
12099 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
12100 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
12101 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
12102 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
12103 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
12104 downloaded by the browser.</p>
12105
12106 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
12107 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
12108 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
12109 can be found on the
12110 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
12111 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
12112 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
12113 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
12114 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
12115
12116 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
12117
12118 <pre>
12119   count MIME type
12120   ----- -----------------------
12121      32 text/plain
12122      30 audio/mpeg
12123      29 image/png
12124      28 image/jpeg
12125      27 application/ogg
12126      26 audio/x-mp3
12127      25 image/tiff
12128      25 image/gif
12129      22 image/bmp
12130      22 audio/x-wav
12131      20 audio/x-flac
12132      19 audio/x-mpegurl
12133      18 video/x-ms-asf
12134      18 audio/x-musepack
12135      18 audio/x-mpeg
12136      18 application/x-ogg
12137      17 video/mpeg
12138      17 audio/x-scpls
12139      17 audio/ogg
12140      16 video/x-ms-wmv
12141 </pre>
12142
12143 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
12144
12145 <pre>
12146   count MIME type
12147   ----- -----------------------
12148      33 text/plain
12149      32 image/png
12150      32 image/jpeg
12151      29 audio/mpeg
12152      27 image/gif
12153      26 image/tiff
12154      26 application/ogg
12155      25 audio/x-mp3
12156      22 image/bmp
12157      21 audio/x-wav
12158      19 audio/x-mpegurl
12159      19 audio/x-mpeg
12160      18 video/mpeg
12161      18 audio/x-scpls
12162      18 audio/x-flac
12163      18 application/x-ogg
12164      17 video/x-ms-asf
12165      17 text/html
12166      17 audio/x-musepack
12167      16 image/x-xbitmap
12168 </pre>
12169
12170 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
12171
12172 <pre>
12173   count MIME type
12174   ----- -----------------------
12175      31 text/plain
12176      31 image/png
12177      31 image/jpeg
12178      29 audio/mpeg
12179      28 application/ogg
12180      27 image/gif
12181      26 image/tiff
12182      26 audio/x-mp3
12183      23 audio/x-wav
12184      22 image/bmp
12185      21 audio/x-flac
12186      20 audio/x-mpegurl
12187      19 audio/x-mpeg
12188      18 video/x-ms-asf
12189      18 video/mpeg
12190      18 audio/x-scpls
12191      18 application/x-ogg
12192      17 audio/x-musepack
12193      16 video/x-ms-wmv
12194      16 video/x-msvideo
12195 </pre>
12196
12197 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
12198 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
12199 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
12200 issues.</p>
12201
12202 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
12203 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
12204
12205       </div>
12206       <div class="tags">
12207
12208
12209         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12210
12211
12212       </div>
12213     </div>
12214     <div class="padding"></div>
12215
12216     <div class="entry">
12217       <div class="title">
12218         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
12219       </div>
12220       <div class="date">
12221         15th January 2013
12222       </div>
12223       <div class="body">
12224         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
12225 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
12226 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
12227 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
12228 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
12229 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
12230 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
12231 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
12232 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
12233 packages.</p>
12234
12235 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
12236 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
12237 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
12238 modalias.</p>
12239
12240 <p><blockquote>
12241 Package: package-name
12242 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
12243 </blockquote></p>
12244
12245 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
12246 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
12247
12248 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
12249 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
12250
12251 <p><blockquote>
12252 Package: cheese
12253 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
12254 </blockquote></p>
12255
12256 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
12257 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
12258
12259 <p><blockquote>
12260 Package: pcmciautils
12261 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
12262 </blockquote></p>
12263
12264 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
12265 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
12266
12267 <p><blockquote>
12268 Package: colorhug-client
12269 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
12270 </blockquote></p>
12271
12272 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
12273 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
12274 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
12275
12276 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
12277 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
12278 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
12279 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
12280 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
12281 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
12282 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
12283 Raring.</p>
12284
12285 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
12286 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
12287 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
12288 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
12289 try the
12290 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
12291 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
12292 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
12293 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
12294
12295 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
12296 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
12297
12298 <p><blockquote>
12299 % ./hw-support-lookup
12300 <br>yubikey-personalization
12301 <br>%
12302 </blockquote></p>
12303
12304 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
12305 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
12306
12307 <p><blockquote>
12308 % ./hw-support-lookup
12309 <br>pcmciautils
12310 <br>%
12311 </blockquote></p>
12312
12313 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
12314 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
12315 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
12316
12317 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
12318 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
12319 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
12320 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
12321 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
12322 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
12323 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
12324 see if it work.</p>
12325
12326 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
12327 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
12328 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
12329 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
12330
12331       </div>
12332       <div class="tags">
12333
12334
12335         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12336
12337
12338       </div>
12339     </div>
12340     <div class="padding"></div>
12341
12342     <div class="entry">
12343       <div class="title">
12344         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
12345       </div>
12346       <div class="date">
12347         14th January 2013
12348       </div>
12349       <div class="body">
12350         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
12351 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
12352 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
12353 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
12354 in
12355 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
12356 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
12357
12358 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
12359
12360 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
12361 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
12362 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
12363 &lt;URL: <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device</a> &gt;,
12364 &lt;URL: <a href="http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c</a> &gt; and
12365 &lt;URL: <a href="http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup</a> &gt;.
12366
12367 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
12368 this shell script:</p>
12369
12370 <pre>
12371 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
12372 </pre>
12373
12374 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
12375 using modinfo:</p>
12376
12377 <pre>
12378 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
12379 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
12380 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
12381 %
12382 </pre>
12383
12384 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
12385
12386 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
12387 Bridge memory controller:</p>
12388
12389 <p><blockquote>
12390 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
12391 </blockquote></p>
12392
12393 <p>This represent these values:</p>
12394
12395 <pre>
12396  v   00008086  (vendor)
12397  d   00002770  (device)
12398  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
12399  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
12400  bc  06        (bus class)
12401  sc  00        (bus subclass)
12402  i   00        (interface)
12403 </pre>
12404
12405 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
12406 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
12407 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
12408 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
12409
12410 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
12411 means.</p>
12412
12413 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
12414
12415 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
12416 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
12417
12418 <p><blockquote>
12419 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
12420 </blockquote></p>
12421
12422 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
12423
12424 <pre>
12425  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
12426  p    0001  (device product)
12427  d    0206  (bcddevice)
12428  dc     09  (device class)
12429  dsc    00  (device subclass)
12430  dp     00  (device protocol)
12431  ic     09  (interface class)
12432  isc    00  (interface subclass)
12433  ip     00  (interface protocol)
12434 </pre>
12435
12436 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
12437 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
12438 these alias entries show up:</p>
12439
12440 <p><blockquote>
12441 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
12442 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
12443 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
12444 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
12445 </blockquote></p>
12446
12447 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
12448 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
12449 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
12450
12451 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
12452
12453 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
12454 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
12455
12456 <p><blockquote>
12457 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
12458 </blockquote></p>
12459
12460 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
12461
12462 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
12463
12464 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
12465 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
12466 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
12467
12468 <p><blockquote>
12469 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
12470 </blockquote></p>
12471
12472 <p>The values present are</p>
12473
12474 <pre>
12475  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
12476  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
12477  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
12478  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
12479  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
12480  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
12481  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
12482  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
12483  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
12484  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
12485  ct   10             (chassis type)
12486  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
12487 </pre>
12488
12489 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
12490 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
12491
12492 <pre>
12493   3 Desktop
12494   4 Low Profile Desktop
12495   5 Pizza Box
12496   6 Mini Tower
12497   7 Tower
12498   8 Portable
12499   9 Laptop
12500  10 Notebook
12501  11 Hand Held
12502  12 Docking Station
12503  13 All In One
12504  14 Sub Notebook
12505  15 Space-saving
12506  16 Lunch Box
12507  17 Main Server Chassis
12508  18 Expansion Chassis
12509  19 Sub Chassis
12510  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
12511  21 Peripheral Chassis
12512  22 RAID Chassis
12513  23 Rack Mount Chassis
12514  24 Sealed-case PC
12515  25 Multi-system
12516  26 CompactPCI
12517  27 AdvancedTCA
12518  28 Blade
12519  29 Blade Enclosing
12520 </pre>
12521
12522 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
12523 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
12524 claim it is a desktop.</p>
12525
12526 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
12527
12528 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
12529 test machine:</p>
12530
12531 <p><blockquote>
12532 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
12533 </blockquote></p>
12534
12535 <p>The values present are</p>
12536
12537 <pre>
12538   ty  01  (type)
12539   pr  00  (prototype)
12540   id  00  (id)
12541   ex  00  (extra)
12542 </pre>
12543
12544 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
12545 the valid values are.</p>
12546
12547 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
12548
12549 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
12550 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
12551 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
12552 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
12553 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
12554 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
12555 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
12556
12557 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
12558
12559 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
12560 one can use the following shell script:</p>
12561
12562 <pre>
12563   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
12564     echo "$id" ; \
12565     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
12566   done
12567 </pre>
12568
12569 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
12570 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
12571
12572 <pre>
12573   acpi:ACPI0003:
12574     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
12575   acpi:device:
12576   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
12577   acpi:IBM0068:
12578     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
12579     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
12580     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
12581     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
12582   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
12583     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
12584     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
12585     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
12586   [...]
12587 </pre>
12588
12589 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
12590 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
12591 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
12592 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
12593
12594 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
12595 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
12596 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
12597
12598       </div>
12599       <div class="tags">
12600
12601
12602         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12603
12604
12605       </div>
12606     </div>
12607     <div class="padding"></div>
12608
12609     <div class="entry">
12610       <div class="title">
12611         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
12612       </div>
12613       <div class="date">
12614         10th January 2013
12615       </div>
12616       <div class="body">
12617         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
12618 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
12619 Launcher and updated the Debian package
12620 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
12621 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
12622 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
12623 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
12624 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
12625 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
12626 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
12627 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
12628 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
12629 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
12630 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
12631 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
12632 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
12633 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
12634 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
12635
12636       </div>
12637       <div class="tags">
12638
12639
12640         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
12641
12642
12643       </div>
12644     </div>
12645     <div class="padding"></div>
12646
12647     <div class="entry">
12648       <div class="title">
12649         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
12650       </div>
12651       <div class="date">
12652          9th January 2013
12653       </div>
12654       <div class="body">
12655         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
12656 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
12657 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
12658 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
12659 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
12660 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
12661 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
12662 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
12663 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
12664 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
12665 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
12666
12667 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
12668 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
12669 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
12670 simple:
12671
12672 <ul>
12673
12674 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
12675   starting when a user log in.</li>
12676
12677 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
12678   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
12679
12680 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
12681   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
12682   packages.</li>
12683
12684 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
12685   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
12686
12687 </ul>
12688
12689 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
12690 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
12691 discover database to find packages and
12692 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
12693 packages.</p>
12694
12695 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
12696 draft package is now checked into
12697 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
12698 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
12699 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
12700 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
12701 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
12702 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
12703 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
12704 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
12705 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
12706 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
12707 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
12708 because of the freeze).</p>
12709
12710 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
12711 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
12712 inserted):</p>
12713
12714 <p align="center"><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
12715
12716 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
12717 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
12718 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
12719
12720 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
12721 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
12722 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
12723 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
12724 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
12725 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
12726 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
12727
12728 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
12729 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
12730 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
12731 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
12732 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
12733 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
12734 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
12735 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
12736 not be installed?</p>
12737
12738 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
12739 please send me an email. :)</p>
12740
12741       </div>
12742       <div class="tags">
12743
12744
12745         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12746
12747
12748       </div>
12749     </div>
12750     <div class="padding"></div>
12751
12752     <div class="entry">
12753       <div class="title">
12754         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
12755       </div>
12756       <div class="date">
12757          2nd January 2013
12758       </div>
12759       <div class="body">
12760         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
12761 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
12762 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
12763 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
12764 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
12765 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
12766 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
12767 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
12768 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
12769 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
12770
12771 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
12772 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
12773 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
12774
12775       </div>
12776       <div class="tags">
12777
12778
12779         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
12780
12781
12782       </div>
12783     </div>
12784     <div class="padding"></div>
12785
12786     <div class="entry">
12787       <div class="title">
12788         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
12789       </div>
12790       <div class="date">
12791         25th December 2012
12792       </div>
12793       <div class="body">
12794         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
12795 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
12796
12797 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
12798 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
12799 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
12800 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
12801 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
12802 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
12803 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
12804 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
12805 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
12806 name.</p>
12807
12808 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
12809 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
12810 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
12811
12812 <blockquote><pre>
12813 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
12814 cd bitcoin
12815 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
12816 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
12817 </pre></blockquote>
12818
12819 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
12820 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
12821 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
12822 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
12823 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
12824 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
12825 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
12826 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
12827 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
12828
12829 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
12830 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
12831 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
12832
12833       </div>
12834       <div class="tags">
12835
12836
12837         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12838
12839
12840       </div>
12841     </div>
12842     <div class="padding"></div>
12843
12844     <div class="entry">
12845       <div class="title">
12846         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
12847       </div>
12848       <div class="date">
12849         21st December 2012
12850       </div>
12851       <div class="body">
12852         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
12853 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
12854 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
12855 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
12856 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
12857 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
12858 is now maintained by a
12859 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
12860 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
12861 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
12862 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
12863 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
12864 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
12865 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
12866 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
12867 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
12868 Corallo in a
12869 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
12870 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
12871 Debian package.</p>
12872
12873 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
12874 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
12875 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
12876 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
12877 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
12878 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
12879 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
12880 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
12881 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
12882 new version to unstable.
12883
12884 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
12885 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
12886 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
12887 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
12888 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
12889 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
12890 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
12891 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
12892 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
12893 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
12894 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
12895 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
12896 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
12897 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
12898 have not tested them.</p>
12899
12900 <p>My
12901 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
12902 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
12903 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
12904 years ago, as can be
12905 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
12906 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
12907 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
12908 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
12909 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
12910 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
12911 the same address as last time,
12912 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
12913
12914       </div>
12915       <div class="tags">
12916
12917
12918         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12919
12920
12921       </div>
12922     </div>
12923     <div class="padding"></div>
12924
12925     <div class="entry">
12926       <div class="title">
12927         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
12928       </div>
12929       <div class="date">
12930          7th September 2012
12931       </div>
12932       <div class="body">
12933         <p>As I
12934 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
12935 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
12936 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
12937 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
12938 repository for the project</a>.</p>
12939
12940 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
12941 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
12942 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
12943 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
12944
12945 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
12946 PostScript formats at
12947 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
12948 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
12949
12950       </div>
12951       <div class="tags">
12952
12953
12954         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
12955
12956
12957       </div>
12958     </div>
12959     <div class="padding"></div>
12960
12961     <div class="entry">
12962       <div class="title">
12963         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
12964       </div>
12965       <div class="date">
12966         16th August 2012
12967       </div>
12968       <div class="body">
12969         <p>I dag fyller
12970 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
12971 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
12972 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
12973
12974       </div>
12975       <div class="tags">
12976
12977
12978         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
12979
12980
12981       </div>
12982     </div>
12983     <div class="padding"></div>
12984
12985     <div class="entry">
12986       <div class="title">
12987         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
12988       </div>
12989       <div class="date">
12990         24th June 2012
12991       </div>
12992       <div class="body">
12993         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
12994 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
12995 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
12996 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
12997 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
12998 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
12999 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
13000 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
13001 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
13002 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
13003 missing in my book.</p>
13004
13005 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
13006 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
13007 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
13008 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
13009 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
13010 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
13011 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
13012
13013       </div>
13014       <div class="tags">
13015
13016
13017         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
13018
13019
13020       </div>
13021     </div>
13022     <div class="padding"></div>
13023
13024     <div class="entry">
13025       <div class="title">
13026         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
13027       </div>
13028       <div class="date">
13029         21st November 2011
13030       </div>
13031       <div class="body">
13032         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
13033 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
13034 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
13035 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
13036 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
13037 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
13038 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
13039 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
13040 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
13041 the tools to do so.</p>
13042
13043 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
13044 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
13045 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
13046 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
13047
13048 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
13049 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
13050 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
13051 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
13052 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
13053 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
13054 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
13055 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
13056
13057 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
13058 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
13059 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
13060
13061 <p><pre>
13062 #!/usr/bin/perl
13063 use strict;
13064 use warnings;
13065 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
13066 BEGIN {
13067     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
13068     my %rhelmodules = (
13069         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
13070         );
13071     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
13072         eval "use $module;";
13073         if ($@) {
13074             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
13075             system("yum install -y $pkg");
13076             eval "use $module;";
13077         }
13078     }
13079 }
13080 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
13081
13082 upgrade_dell();
13083
13084 exit 0;
13085
13086 sub run_firmware_script {
13087     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
13088     unless ($script) {
13089         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
13090         exit 1
13091     }
13092     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
13093
13094     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
13095         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
13096     } else {
13097         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
13098     }
13099 }
13100
13101 sub run_firmware_scripts {
13102     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
13103     # Run firmware packages
13104     for my $dir (@dirs) {
13105         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
13106         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
13107         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
13108             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
13109             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
13110         }
13111         closedir $dh;
13112     }
13113 }
13114
13115 sub download {
13116     my $url = shift;
13117     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
13118     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
13119 }
13120
13121 sub upgrade_dell {
13122     my @dirs;
13123     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
13124     chomp $product;
13125
13126     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
13127
13128         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
13129         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
13130
13131         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
13132             CLEANUP => 1
13133             );
13134         chdir($tmpdir);
13135         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
13136         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
13137         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
13138         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
13139         my $fwopts = "-q";
13140         if (@paths) {
13141             for my $url (@paths) {
13142                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
13143             }
13144             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
13145         } else {
13146             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
13147             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
13148         }
13149         chdir('/');
13150     } else {
13151         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
13152         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
13153     }
13154 }
13155
13156 sub fetch_dell_fw {
13157     my $path = shift;
13158     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
13159     download($url);
13160 }
13161
13162 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
13163 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
13164 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
13165 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
13166     my $filename = shift;
13167
13168     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
13169     chomp $product;
13170     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
13171
13172     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
13173
13174     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
13175     my @paths;
13176     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
13177         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
13178         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
13179         my $oscode;
13180         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
13181             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
13182         } else {
13183             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
13184         }
13185         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
13186         {
13187             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
13188         }
13189     }
13190     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
13191         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
13192
13193         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
13194         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
13195
13196         my $cpath = $component->{path};
13197         for my $path (@paths) {
13198             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
13199                 push(@paths, $cpath);
13200             }
13201         }
13202     }
13203     return @paths;
13204 }
13205 </pre>
13206
13207 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
13208 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
13209 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
13210 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
13211 outdated.</p>
13212
13213       </div>
13214       <div class="tags">
13215
13216
13217         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13218
13219
13220       </div>
13221     </div>
13222     <div class="padding"></div>
13223
13224     <div class="entry">
13225       <div class="title">
13226         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13227       </div>
13228       <div class="date">
13229          4th August 2011
13230       </div>
13231       <div class="body">
13232         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
13233 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
13234 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
13235 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
13236 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
13237 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
13238 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
13239 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
13240 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
13241
13242 <p><blockquote>
13243 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
13244 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
13245 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
13246 </blockquote></p>
13247
13248 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
13249 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
13250 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
13251 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
13252 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
13253 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
13254 hard to explain.</p>
13255
13256 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
13257 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
13258 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
13259 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
13260 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
13261 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
13262 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
13263 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
13264 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
13265 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
13266 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
13267 mode).</p>
13268
13269 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
13270 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
13271 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
13272 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
13273 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
13274 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
13275 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
13276 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
13277 after visiting single user mode.</p>
13278
13279 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
13280 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
13281 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
13282 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
13283 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
13284 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
13285 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
13286 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
13287
13288 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
13289 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
13290 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
13291
13292       </div>
13293       <div class="tags">
13294
13295
13296         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13297
13298
13299       </div>
13300     </div>
13301     <div class="padding"></div>
13302
13303     <div class="entry">
13304       <div class="title">
13305         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13306       </div>
13307       <div class="date">
13308         30th July 2011
13309       </div>
13310       <div class="body">
13311         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
13312 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
13313 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
13314 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
13315 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
13316 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
13317 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
13318 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
13319 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
13320 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
13321 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
13322 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
13323 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
13324
13325 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
13326 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
13327 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
13328 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
13329 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
13330 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
13331 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
13332 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
13333 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
13334
13335 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
13336 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
13337 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
13338 is presented.</p>
13339
13340 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
13341 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
13342 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
13343 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
13344 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
13345 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
13346 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
13347 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
13348 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
13349 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
13350 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
13351 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
13352 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
13353 find time to push this forward.</p>
13354
13355       </div>
13356       <div class="tags">
13357
13358
13359         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13360
13361
13362       </div>
13363     </div>
13364     <div class="padding"></div>
13365
13366     <div class="entry">
13367       <div class="title">
13368         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13369       </div>
13370       <div class="date">
13371         29th July 2011
13372       </div>
13373       <div class="body">
13374         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
13375 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
13376 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
13377 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
13378 issues.</p>
13379
13380 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
13381 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
13382 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
13383
13384 <ol>
13385
13386 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
13387 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
13388 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
13389 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
13390 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
13391 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
13392 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
13393 Debian.</li>
13394
13395 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
13396 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
13397 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
13398 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
13399 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
13400 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
13401 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
13402 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
13403 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
13404 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
13405 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
13406 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
13407 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
13408
13409 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
13410 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
13411 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
13412 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
13413 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
13414 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
13415 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
13416 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
13417 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
13418 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
13419
13420 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
13421 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
13422 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
13423 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
13424 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
13425 latter behaviour.</li>
13426
13427 </ol>
13428
13429 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
13430 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
13431 it do not matter much.</p>
13432
13433 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
13434 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
13435 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
13436
13437       </div>
13438       <div class="tags">
13439
13440
13441         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13442
13443
13444       </div>
13445     </div>
13446     <div class="padding"></div>
13447
13448     <div class="entry">
13449       <div class="title">
13450         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13451       </div>
13452       <div class="date">
13453         26th July 2011
13454       </div>
13455       <div class="body">
13456         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
13457 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
13458 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
13459 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
13460 security support for a few years.</p>
13461
13462 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
13463 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
13464 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
13465 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
13466 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
13467 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
13468 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
13469 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
13470 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
13471 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
13472 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
13473 easier in the future.</p>
13474
13475 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
13476 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
13477 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
13478 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
13479 do not have time for.</p>
13480
13481       </div>
13482       <div class="tags">
13483
13484
13485         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
13486
13487
13488       </div>
13489     </div>
13490     <div class="padding"></div>
13491
13492     <div class="entry">
13493       <div class="title">
13494         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13495       </div>
13496       <div class="date">
13497          3rd April 2011
13498       </div>
13499       <div class="body">
13500         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
13501 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
13502 update in English.</p>
13503
13504 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
13505 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
13506 of the British service
13507 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
13508 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
13509 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
13510 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
13511 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
13512 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
13513 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
13514 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
13515 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
13516 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
13517 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
13518 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
13519 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
13520
13521 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
13522 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
13523 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
13524 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
13525 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
13526 public infrastructure.</p>
13527
13528 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
13529 such service?</p>
13530
13531       </div>
13532       <div class="tags">
13533
13534
13535         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
13536
13537
13538       </div>
13539     </div>
13540     <div class="padding"></div>
13541
13542     <div class="entry">
13543       <div class="title">
13544         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13545       </div>
13546       <div class="date">
13547         28th January 2011
13548       </div>
13549       <div class="body">
13550         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
13551 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
13552 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
13553 available on the Internet, and check our locally
13554 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
13555 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
13556 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
13557 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
13558 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
13559 out which security holes were present in our free software
13560 collection.</p>
13561
13562 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
13563 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
13564 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
13565 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
13566 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
13567 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
13568 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
13569 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
13570 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
13571 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
13572 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
13573 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
13574 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
13575 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
13576 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
13577 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
13578
13579 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
13580 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
13581 check out, one could look up
13582 <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
13583 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
13584 The most recent one is
13585 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
13586 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
13587 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
13588
13589 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
13590 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
13591 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
13592 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
13593 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
13594 security issues out.</p>
13595
13596 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
13597 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
13598 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
13599 RHEL is providing
13600 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
13601 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
13602 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
13603
13604 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
13605 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
13606 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
13607 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
13608 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
13609 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
13610 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
13611 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
13612 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
13613 established soon.</p>
13614
13615 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
13616 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
13617 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
13618 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
13619 for their packages.</p>
13620
13621       </div>
13622       <div class="tags">
13623
13624
13625         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13626
13627
13628       </div>
13629     </div>
13630     <div class="padding"></div>
13631
13632     <div class="entry">
13633       <div class="title">
13634         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
13635       </div>
13636       <div class="date">
13637         23rd January 2011
13638       </div>
13639       <div class="body">
13640         <p>In the
13641 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
13642 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
13643 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
13644 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
13645 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
13646 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
13647 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
13648 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
13649 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
13650 one of my machines like this:</p>
13651
13652 <pre>
13653 loaded modules:
13654 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
13655 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
13656 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
13657 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
13658 10de:03ec pata_amd
13659 10de:03f6 sata_nv
13660 1022:1103 k8temp
13661 109e:036e bttv
13662 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
13663 11ab:4364 sky2
13664 </pre>
13665
13666 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
13667 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
13668
13669 <pre>
13670 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
13671     echo loaded pci modules:
13672     (
13673         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
13674         for address in * ; do
13675             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
13676                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
13677                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
13678                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
13679                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
13680                     echo "$id $module"
13681                 fi
13682             fi
13683         done
13684     )
13685     echo
13686 fi
13687 </pre>
13688
13689 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
13690 mappings:</p>
13691
13692 <pre>
13693 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
13694     echo loaded usb modules:
13695     (
13696         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
13697         for address in * ; do
13698             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
13699                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
13700                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
13701                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
13702                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
13703                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
13704                         echo "$id $module"
13705                     fi
13706                 fi
13707             fi
13708         done
13709     )
13710     echo
13711 fi
13712 </pre>
13713
13714 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
13715 well.</p>
13716
13717       </div>
13718       <div class="tags">
13719
13720
13721         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13722
13723
13724       </div>
13725     </div>
13726     <div class="padding"></div>
13727
13728     <div class="entry">
13729       <div class="title">
13730         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
13731       </div>
13732       <div class="date">
13733         22nd December 2010
13734       </div>
13735       <div class="body">
13736         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
13737 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
13738 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
13739 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
13740 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
13741 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
13742 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
13743 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
13744 university.</p>
13745
13746 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
13747 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
13748 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
13749 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
13750 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
13751 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
13752 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
13753 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
13754
13755 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
13756 I perform on a new model.</p>
13757
13758 <ul>
13759
13760 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
13761 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
13762 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
13763
13764 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
13765 installation, X.org is working.</li>
13766
13767 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
13768 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
13769 reported by the program.</li>
13770
13771 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
13772 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
13773 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
13774 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
13775 normally test this by playing
13776 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
13777 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
13778
13779 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
13780 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
13781
13782 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
13783 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
13784
13785 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
13786 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
13787
13788 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
13789 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
13790 few.</li>
13791
13792 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
13793 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
13794 notice this.</li>
13795
13796 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
13797 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
13798 resume.</li>
13799
13800 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
13801 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
13802 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
13803 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
13804 not.</li>
13805
13806 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
13807 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
13808 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
13809 existence.</li>
13810
13811 </ul>
13812
13813 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
13814 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
13815 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
13816 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
13817 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
13818 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
13819 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
13820 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
13821
13822       </div>
13823       <div class="tags">
13824
13825
13826         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13827
13828
13829       </div>
13830     </div>
13831     <div class="padding"></div>
13832
13833     <div class="entry">
13834       <div class="title">
13835         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
13836       </div>
13837       <div class="date">
13838         11th December 2010
13839       </div>
13840       <div class="body">
13841         <p>As I continue to explore
13842 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
13843 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
13844 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
13845
13846 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
13847 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
13848 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
13849 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
13850 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
13851 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
13852 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
13853 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
13854 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
13855 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
13856 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
13857 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
13858 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
13859 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
13860 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
13861 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
13862 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
13863 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
13864 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
13865 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
13866
13867 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
13868 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
13869 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
13870 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
13871 If the Skolelinux foundation
13872 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
13873 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
13874 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
13875 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
13876 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
13877 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
13878 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
13879 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
13880
13881 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
13882 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
13883 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
13884 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
13885 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
13886 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
13887 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
13888 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
13889 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
13890 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
13891 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
13892 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
13893 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
13894 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
13895 currencies.</p>
13896
13897 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
13898 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
13899 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
13900 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
13901 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
13902 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
13903 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
13904 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
13905 BitCoins.  Check out
13906 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
13907 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
13908 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
13909 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
13910 yet.</p>
13911
13912 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
13913 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
13914 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
13915 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
13916 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
13917
13918       </div>
13919       <div class="tags">
13920
13921
13922         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13923
13924
13925       </div>
13926     </div>
13927     <div class="padding"></div>
13928
13929     <div class="entry">
13930       <div class="title">
13931         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
13932       </div>
13933       <div class="date">
13934         10th December 2010
13935       </div>
13936       <div class="body">
13937         <p>With this weeks lawless
13938 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
13939 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
13940 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
13941 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
13942 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
13943 A blog post from
13944 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
13945 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
13946 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
13947 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
13948 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
13949 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
13950 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
13951
13952 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
13953 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
13954 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
13955 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
13956 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
13957 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
13958 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
13959 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
13960 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
13961 Debian</a> soon.</p>
13962
13963 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
13964 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
13965 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
13966 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
13967 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
13968 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
13969 you can even get
13970 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
13971 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
13972 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
13973 on the current exchange rates.</p>
13974
13975 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
13976 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
13977 donations to the address
13978 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
13979
13980       </div>
13981       <div class="tags">
13982
13983
13984         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13985
13986
13987       </div>
13988     </div>
13989     <div class="padding"></div>
13990
13991     <div class="entry">
13992       <div class="title">
13993         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
13994       </div>
13995       <div class="date">
13996         27th November 2010
13997       </div>
13998       <div class="body">
13999         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
14000 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
14001 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
14002 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
14003 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
14004 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
14005 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
14006 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
14007
14008 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
14009 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
14010 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
14011 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
14012 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
14013 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
14014 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
14015 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
14016 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
14017 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
14018 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
14019
14020 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
14021 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
14022 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
14023 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
14024 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
14025 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
14026 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
14027 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
14028 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
14029 what is going on.</p>
14030
14031       </div>
14032       <div class="tags">
14033
14034
14035         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14036
14037
14038       </div>
14039     </div>
14040     <div class="padding"></div>
14041
14042     <div class="entry">
14043       <div class="title">
14044         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
14045       </div>
14046       <div class="date">
14047         22nd November 2010
14048       </div>
14049       <div class="body">
14050         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
14051 upgrade testing of the
14052 <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
14053 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
14054 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
14055 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
14056
14057 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
14058
14059 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
14060
14061 <blockquote><p>
14062   apache2.2-bin
14063   aptdaemon
14064   baobab
14065   binfmt-support
14066   browser-plugin-gnash
14067   cheese-common
14068   cli-common
14069   cups-pk-helper
14070   dmz-cursor-theme
14071   empathy
14072   empathy-common
14073   freedesktop-sound-theme
14074   freeglut3
14075   gconf-defaults-service
14076   gdm-themes
14077   gedit-plugins
14078   geoclue
14079   geoclue-hostip
14080   geoclue-localnet
14081   geoclue-manual
14082   geoclue-yahoo
14083   gnash
14084   gnash-common
14085   gnome
14086   gnome-backgrounds
14087   gnome-cards-data
14088   gnome-codec-install
14089   gnome-core
14090   gnome-desktop-environment
14091   gnome-disk-utility
14092   gnome-screenshot
14093   gnome-search-tool
14094   gnome-session-canberra
14095   gnome-system-log
14096   gnome-themes-extras
14097   gnome-themes-more
14098   gnome-user-share
14099   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
14100   gstreamer0.10-tools
14101   gtk2-engines
14102   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
14103   gtk2-engines-smooth
14104   hamster-applet
14105   libapache2-mod-dnssd
14106   libapr1
14107   libaprutil1
14108   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
14109   libaprutil1-ldap
14110   libart2.0-cil
14111   libboost-date-time1.42.0
14112   libboost-python1.42.0
14113   libboost-thread1.42.0
14114   libchamplain-0.4-0
14115   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
14116   libcheese-gtk18
14117   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
14118   libcryptui0
14119   libdiscid0
14120   libelf1
14121   libepc-1.0-2
14122   libepc-common
14123   libepc-ui-1.0-2
14124   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
14125   libfreerdp0
14126   libgconf2.0-cil
14127   libgdata-common
14128   libgdata7
14129   libgdu-gtk0
14130   libgee2
14131   libgeoclue0
14132   libgexiv2-0
14133   libgif4
14134   libglade2.0-cil
14135   libglib2.0-cil
14136   libgmime2.4-cil
14137   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
14138   libgnome2.24-cil
14139   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
14140   libgpod-common
14141   libgpod4
14142   libgtk2.0-cil
14143   libgtkglext1
14144   libgtksourceview2.0-common
14145   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
14146   libmono-addins0.2-cil
14147   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
14148   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
14149   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
14150   libmono-posix2.0-cil
14151   libmono-security2.0-cil
14152   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
14153   libmono-system2.0-cil
14154   libmtp8
14155   libmusicbrainz3-6
14156   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
14157   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
14158   libopal3.6.8
14159   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
14160   libpt2.6.7
14161   libpython2.6
14162   librpm1
14163   librpmio1
14164   libsdl1.2debian
14165   libsrtp0
14166   libssh-4
14167   libtelepathy-farsight0
14168   libtelepathy-glib0
14169   libtidy-0.99-0
14170   media-player-info
14171   mesa-utils
14172   mono-2.0-gac
14173   mono-gac
14174   mono-runtime
14175   nautilus-sendto
14176   nautilus-sendto-empathy
14177   p7zip-full
14178   pkg-config
14179   python-aptdaemon
14180   python-aptdaemon-gtk
14181   python-axiom
14182   python-beautifulsoup
14183   python-bugbuddy
14184   python-clientform
14185   python-coherence
14186   python-configobj
14187   python-crypto
14188   python-cupshelpers
14189   python-elementtree
14190   python-epsilon
14191   python-evolution
14192   python-feedparser
14193   python-gdata
14194   python-gdbm
14195   python-gst0.10
14196   python-gtkglext1
14197   python-gtksourceview2
14198   python-httplib2
14199   python-louie
14200   python-mako
14201   python-markupsafe
14202   python-mechanize
14203   python-nevow
14204   python-notify
14205   python-opengl
14206   python-openssl
14207   python-pam
14208   python-pkg-resources
14209   python-pyasn1
14210   python-pysqlite2
14211   python-rdflib
14212   python-serial
14213   python-tagpy
14214   python-twisted-bin
14215   python-twisted-conch
14216   python-twisted-core
14217   python-twisted-web
14218   python-utidylib
14219   python-webkit
14220   python-xdg
14221   python-zope.interface
14222   remmina
14223   remmina-plugin-data
14224   remmina-plugin-rdp
14225   remmina-plugin-vnc
14226   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
14227   rhythmbox-plugins
14228   rpm-common
14229   rpm2cpio
14230   seahorse-plugins
14231   shotwell
14232   software-center
14233   system-config-printer-udev
14234   telepathy-gabble
14235   telepathy-mission-control-5
14236   telepathy-salut
14237   tomboy
14238   totem
14239   totem-coherence
14240   totem-mozilla
14241   totem-plugins
14242   transmission-common
14243   xdg-user-dirs
14244   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
14245   xserver-xephyr
14246 </p></blockquote>
14247
14248 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
14249
14250 <blockquote><p>
14251   cheese
14252   ekiga
14253   eog
14254   epiphany-extensions
14255   evolution-exchange
14256   fast-user-switch-applet
14257   file-roller
14258   gcalctool
14259   gconf-editor
14260   gdm
14261   gedit
14262   gedit-common
14263   gnome-games
14264   gnome-games-data
14265   gnome-nettool
14266   gnome-system-tools
14267   gnome-themes
14268   gnuchess
14269   gucharmap
14270   guile-1.8-libs
14271   libavahi-ui0
14272   libdmx1
14273   libgalago3
14274   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
14275   libgtksourceview2.0-0
14276   liblircclient0
14277   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
14278   libspeexdsp1
14279   libsvga1
14280   rhythmbox
14281   seahorse
14282   sound-juicer
14283   system-config-printer
14284   totem-common
14285   transmission-gtk
14286   vinagre
14287   vino
14288 </p></blockquote>
14289
14290 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
14291
14292 <blockquote><p>
14293   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
14294 </p></blockquote>
14295
14296 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
14297
14298 <blockquote><p>
14299 [nothing]
14300 </p></blockquote>
14301
14302 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
14303
14304 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
14305
14306 <blockquote><p>
14307   ksmserver
14308 </p></blockquote>
14309
14310 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
14311
14312 <blockquote><p>
14313   kwin
14314   network-manager-kde
14315 </p></blockquote>
14316
14317 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
14318
14319 <blockquote><p>
14320   arts
14321   dolphin
14322   freespacenotifier
14323   google-gadgets-gst
14324   google-gadgets-xul
14325   kappfinder
14326   kcalc
14327   kcharselect
14328   kde-core
14329   kde-plasma-desktop
14330   kde-standard
14331   kde-window-manager
14332   kdeartwork
14333   kdeartwork-emoticons
14334   kdeartwork-style
14335   kdeartwork-theme-icon
14336   kdebase
14337   kdebase-apps
14338   kdebase-workspace
14339   kdebase-workspace-bin
14340   kdebase-workspace-data
14341   kdeeject
14342   kdelibs
14343   kdeplasma-addons
14344   kdeutils
14345   kdewallpapers
14346   kdf
14347   kfloppy
14348   kgpg
14349   khelpcenter4
14350   kinfocenter
14351   konq-plugins-l10n
14352   konqueror-nsplugins
14353   kscreensaver
14354   kscreensaver-xsavers
14355   ktimer
14356   kwrite
14357   libgle3
14358   libkde4-ruby1.8
14359   libkonq5
14360   libkonq5-templates
14361   libnetpbm10
14362   libplasma-ruby
14363   libplasma-ruby1.8
14364   libqt4-ruby1.8
14365   marble-data
14366   marble-plugins
14367   netpbm
14368   nuvola-icon-theme
14369   plasma-dataengines-workspace
14370   plasma-desktop
14371   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
14372   plasma-runners-addons
14373   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
14374   plasma-scriptengine-python
14375   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
14376   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
14377   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
14378   plasma-scriptengines
14379   plasma-wallpapers-addons
14380   plasma-widget-folderview
14381   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
14382   ruby
14383   sweeper
14384   update-notifier-kde
14385   xscreensaver-data-extra
14386   xscreensaver-gl
14387   xscreensaver-gl-extra
14388   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
14389 </p></blockquote>
14390
14391 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
14392
14393 <blockquote><p>
14394   ark
14395   google-gadgets-common
14396   google-gadgets-qt
14397   htdig
14398   kate
14399   kdebase-bin
14400   kdebase-data
14401   kdepasswd
14402   kfind
14403   klipper
14404   konq-plugins
14405   konqueror
14406   ksysguard
14407   ksysguardd
14408   libarchive1
14409   libcln6
14410   libeet1
14411   libeina-svn-06
14412   libggadget-1.0-0b
14413   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
14414   libgps19
14415   libkdecorations4
14416   libkephal4
14417   libkonq4
14418   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
14419   libkscreensaver5
14420   libksgrd4
14421   libksignalplotter4
14422   libkunitconversion4
14423   libkwineffects1a
14424   libmarblewidget4
14425   libntrack-qt4-1
14426   libntrack0
14427   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
14428   libplasmaclock4a
14429   libplasmagenericshell4
14430   libprocesscore4a
14431   libprocessui4a
14432   libqalculate5
14433   libqedje0a
14434   libqtruby4shared2
14435   libqzion0a
14436   libruby1.8
14437   libscim8c2a
14438   libsmokekdecore4-3
14439   libsmokekdeui4-3
14440   libsmokekfile3
14441   libsmokekhtml3
14442   libsmokekio3
14443   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
14444   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
14445   libsmokekparts3
14446   libsmokektexteditor3
14447   libsmokekutils3
14448   libsmokenepomuk3
14449   libsmokephonon3
14450   libsmokeplasma3
14451   libsmokeqtcore4-3
14452   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
14453   libsmokeqtgui4-3
14454   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
14455   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
14456   libsmokeqtscript4-3
14457   libsmokeqtsql4-3
14458   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
14459   libsmokeqttest4-3
14460   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
14461   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
14462   libsmokeqtxml4-3
14463   libsmokesolid3
14464   libsmokesoprano3
14465   libtaskmanager4a
14466   libtidy-0.99-0
14467   libweather-ion4a
14468   libxklavier16
14469   libxxf86misc1
14470   okteta
14471   oxygencursors
14472   plasma-dataengines-addons
14473   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
14474   plasma-widget-lancelot
14475   plasma-widgets-addons
14476   plasma-widgets-workspace
14477   polkit-kde-1
14478   ruby1.8
14479   systemsettings
14480   update-notifier-common
14481 </p></blockquote>
14482
14483 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
14484 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
14485 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
14486 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
14487
14488       </div>
14489       <div class="tags">
14490
14491
14492         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14493
14494
14495       </div>
14496     </div>
14497     <div class="padding"></div>
14498
14499     <div class="entry">
14500       <div class="title">
14501         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
14502       </div>
14503       <div class="date">
14504         22nd November 2010
14505       </div>
14506       <div class="body">
14507         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
14508 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
14509 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
14510 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
14511 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
14512 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
14513 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
14514 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
14515 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
14516
14517 <p>I found
14518 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
14519 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
14520 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
14521 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
14522 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
14523 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
14524
14525 <pre>
14526 #!/bin/sh
14527
14528 # Based on
14529 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
14530
14531 set -e
14532 set -x
14533
14534 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
14535     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
14536     exit 1
14537 else
14538     host="$1"
14539 fi
14540
14541 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
14542     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
14543     exit 1
14544 fi
14545
14546 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
14547 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
14548 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
14549 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
14550
14551 img=$host.img
14552 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
14553 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
14554
14555 parted $img mklabel msdos
14556 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
14557 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
14558 parted $img set 1 boot on
14559
14560 modprobe dm-mod
14561 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
14562 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
14563
14564 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
14565 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
14566 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
14567
14568 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
14569 losetup -d /dev/loop0
14570 </pre>
14571
14572 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
14573 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
14574
14575 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
14576 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
14577 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
14578 seem to work just fine.</p>
14579
14580       </div>
14581       <div class="tags">
14582
14583
14584         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14585
14586
14587       </div>
14588     </div>
14589     <div class="padding"></div>
14590
14591     <div class="entry">
14592       <div class="title">
14593         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
14594       </div>
14595       <div class="date">
14596         20th November 2010
14597       </div>
14598       <div class="body">
14599         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
14600 <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
14601 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
14602 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
14603
14604 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
14605 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
14606 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
14607
14608 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
14609
14610 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
14611
14612 <blockquote><p>
14613   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
14614   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
14615   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
14616   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
14617   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
14618   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
14619   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
14620   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
14621   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
14622   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
14623   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
14624   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
14625   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
14626   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
14627   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
14628   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
14629   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
14630   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
14631   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
14632   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
14633   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
14634   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
14635   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
14636   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
14637   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
14638   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
14639   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
14640   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
14641   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
14642   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
14643   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
14644   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
14645   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
14646   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
14647   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
14648   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
14649   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
14650   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
14651   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
14652   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
14653   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
14654   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
14655   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
14656   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
14657   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
14658   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
14659   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
14660   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
14661   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
14662   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
14663   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
14664   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
14665   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
14666   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
14667   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
14668   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
14669   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
14670   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
14671   zip
14672 </p></blockquote>
14673
14674 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
14675
14676 <blockquote><p>
14677   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
14678   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
14679   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
14680   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
14681   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
14682   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
14683   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
14684   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
14685   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
14686   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
14687   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
14688   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
14689   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
14690   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
14691   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
14692   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
14693   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
14694   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
14695   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
14696   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
14697   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
14698   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
14699   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
14700   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
14701   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
14702   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
14703   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
14704   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
14705   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
14706 </p></blockquote>
14707
14708 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
14709
14710 <blockquote><p>
14711   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
14712 </p></blockquote>
14713
14714 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
14715
14716 <blockquote><p>
14717 [nothing]
14718 </p></blockquote>
14719
14720 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
14721
14722 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
14723
14724 <blockquote><p>
14725   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
14726   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
14727   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
14728   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
14729   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
14730   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
14731   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
14732   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
14733   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
14734   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
14735   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
14736   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
14737   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
14738   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
14739   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
14740   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
14741   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
14742   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
14743   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
14744   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
14745   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
14746   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
14747   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
14748   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
14749   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
14750   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
14751   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
14752   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
14753   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
14754   ttf-sazanami-gothic
14755 </p></blockquote>
14756
14757 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
14758
14759 <blockquote><p>
14760   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
14761   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
14762   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
14763   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
14764   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
14765   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
14766   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
14767   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
14768   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
14769   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
14770   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
14771   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
14772   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
14773   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
14774   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
14775   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
14776   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
14777   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
14778   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
14779   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
14780   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
14781   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
14782   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
14783   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
14784   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
14785   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
14786   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
14787   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
14788   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
14789   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
14790   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
14791   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
14792   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
14793 </p></blockquote>
14794
14795 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
14796
14797 <blockquote><p>
14798   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
14799   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
14800   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
14801   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
14802   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
14803   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
14804   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
14805 </p></blockquote>
14806
14807 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
14808
14809 <blockquote><p>
14810   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
14811 </p></blockquote>
14812
14813       </div>
14814       <div class="tags">
14815
14816
14817         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14818
14819
14820       </div>
14821     </div>
14822     <div class="padding"></div>
14823
14824     <div class="entry">
14825       <div class="title">
14826         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
14827       </div>
14828       <div class="date">
14829         20th November 2010
14830       </div>
14831       <div class="body">
14832         <p>Answering
14833 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
14834 call from the Gnash project</a> for
14835 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
14836 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
14837 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
14838 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
14839 releases out more often.</p>
14840
14841 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
14842 I have considered setting up a <a
14843 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
14844 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
14845 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
14846 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
14847 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
14848 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
14849 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
14850 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
14851 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
14852 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
14853 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
14854 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
14855
14856       </div>
14857       <div class="tags">
14858
14859
14860         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14861
14862
14863       </div>
14864     </div>
14865     <div class="padding"></div>
14866
14867     <div class="entry">
14868       <div class="title">
14869         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
14870       </div>
14871       <div class="date">
14872          9th November 2010
14873       </div>
14874       <div class="body">
14875         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
14876
14877 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
14878 3D linked in from
14879 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
14880 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
14881
14882       </div>
14883       <div class="tags">
14884
14885
14886         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14887
14888
14889       </div>
14890     </div>
14891     <div class="padding"></div>
14892
14893     <div class="entry">
14894       <div class="title">
14895         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
14896       </div>
14897       <div class="date">
14898         24th October 2010
14899       </div>
14900       <div class="body">
14901         <p>Some updates.</p>
14902
14903 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
14904 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
14905 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
14906 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
14907 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
14908 :)</p>
14909
14910 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
14911 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
14912 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
14913 It is called
14914 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
14915 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
14916 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
14917 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
14918 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
14919 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
14920
14921 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
14922 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
14923 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
14924 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
14925 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
14926 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
14927 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
14928 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
14929 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
14930 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
14931
14932       </div>
14933       <div class="tags">
14934
14935
14936         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
14937
14938
14939       </div>
14940     </div>
14941     <div class="padding"></div>
14942
14943     <div class="entry">
14944       <div class="title">
14945         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
14946       </div>
14947       <div class="date">
14948          4th September 2010
14949       </div>
14950       <div class="body">
14951         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
14952 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
14953 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
14954 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
14955 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
14956 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
14957 installed.</p>
14958
14959 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
14960 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
14961 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
14962 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
14963 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
14964 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
14965 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
14966 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
14967 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
14968
14969 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
14970 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
14971 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
14972 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
14973 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
14974 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
14975 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
14976 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
14977 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
14978 pages they want to visit.</p>
14979
14980 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
14981 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
14982 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
14983 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
14984 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
14985 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
14986 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
14987 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
14988 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
14989 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
14990 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
14991
14992       </div>
14993       <div class="tags">
14994
14995
14996         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14997
14998
14999       </div>
15000     </div>
15001     <div class="padding"></div>
15002
15003     <div class="entry">
15004       <div class="title">
15005         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
15006       </div>
15007       <div class="date">
15008         27th July 2010
15009       </div>
15010       <div class="body">
15011         <p>I discovered this while doing
15012 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
15013 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
15014 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
15015 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
15016 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
15017
15018 <p>An example is from todays
15019 <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
15020 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
15021 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
15022 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
15023 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
15024 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
15025 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
15026
15027 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
15028
15029 <blockquote><pre>
15030 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
15031  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
15032   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
15033 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
15034  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
15035 </pre></blockquote>
15036
15037 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
15038 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
15039 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
15040 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
15041 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
15042 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
15043 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
15044 of dependency loops.</p>
15045
15046 <p>Thanks to
15047 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
15048 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
15049 dependencies
15050 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
15051 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
15052
15053 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
15054 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
15055 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
15056 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
15057 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
15058 it.</p>
15059
15060       </div>
15061       <div class="tags">
15062
15063
15064         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15065
15066
15067       </div>
15068     </div>
15069     <div class="padding"></div>
15070
15071     <div class="entry">
15072       <div class="title">
15073         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
15074       </div>
15075       <div class="date">
15076         17th July 2010
15077       </div>
15078       <div class="body">
15079         <p>This is a
15080 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
15081 on my
15082 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
15083 work</a> on
15084 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
15085 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
15086
15087 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
15088 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
15089 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
15090 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
15091
15092 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
15093 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
15094 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
15095
15096 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
15097
15098 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
15099 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
15100 the web.
15101
15102 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
15103 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
15104 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
15105 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
15106 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
15107 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
15108
15109 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
15110 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
15111 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
15112 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
15113 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
15114 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
15115 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
15116 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
15117 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
15118 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
15119 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
15120 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
15121 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
15122 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
15123 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
15124 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
15125
15126 <blockquote><pre>
15127 ldapsearch -h ldap \
15128   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
15129   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
15130   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
15131   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
15132   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
15133   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
15134
15135 ldapsearch -h ldap \
15136   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
15137   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
15138   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
15139   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
15140   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
15141 </pre></blockquote>
15142
15143 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
15144 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
15145 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
15146 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15147 also exist.</p>
15148
15149 <blockquote><pre>
15150 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15151 objectclass: top
15152 objectclass: dnsdomain
15153 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15154 dc: tjener
15155 arecord: 10.0.2.2
15156 associateddomain: tjener.intern
15157
15158 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15159 objectclass: top
15160 objectclass: dnsdomain2
15161 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15162 dc: 2
15163 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
15164 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
15165 </pre></blockquote>
15166
15167 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
15168 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
15169 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
15170 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
15171 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
15172 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
15173 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
15174 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
15175 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
15176 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
15177 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
15178 instead.</p>
15179
15180 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
15181 like this:</p>
15182
15183 <blockquote><pre>
15184 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
15185   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
15186   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
15187   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
15188   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
15189   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
15190
15191 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
15192   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
15193 </pre></blockquote>
15194
15195 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
15196 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
15197 reverse lookups.</p>
15198
15199 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
15200 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
15201 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
15202 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
15203
15204 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
15205 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
15206 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
15207
15208 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
15209 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
15210 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
15211 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
15212 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
15213
15214 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
15215 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
15216 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
15217 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
15218 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
15219
15220 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
15221 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
15222 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
15223 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
15224 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
15225 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
15226
15227 <blockquote><pre>
15228 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
15229     SUP top
15230     AUXILIARY
15231     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
15232           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
15233           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
15234           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
15235           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
15236     ))
15237 </pre></blockquote>
15238
15239 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
15240 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
15241 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
15242 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
15243 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
15244 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
15245
15246 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
15247
15248 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
15249 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
15250 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
15251 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
15252 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
15253
15254 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
15255 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
15256 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
15257 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
15258
15259 <blockquote><pre>
15260 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
15261 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
15262 </pre></blockquote>
15263
15264 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
15265 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
15266 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
15267 search result is this entry:</p>
15268
15269 <blockquote><pre>
15270 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15271 cn: dhcp
15272 objectClass: top
15273 objectClass: dhcpServer
15274 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15275 </pre></blockquote>
15276
15277 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
15278 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
15279 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
15280 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
15281 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
15282 The search result is this entry:</p>
15283
15284 <blockquote><pre>
15285 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15286 cn: DHCP Config
15287 objectClass: top
15288 objectClass: dhcpService
15289 objectClass: dhcpOptions
15290 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15291 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
15292 dhcpStatements: authoritative
15293 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
15294 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
15295 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
15296 </pre></blockquote>
15297
15298 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
15299 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
15300 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
15301 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
15302 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
15303 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
15304 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
15305 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
15306 related computer objects.</p>
15307
15308 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
15309 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
15310 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
15311 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
15312 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
15313 like:</p>
15314
15315 <blockquote><pre>
15316 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15317 cn: hostname
15318 objectClass: top
15319 objectClass: dhcpHost
15320 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
15321 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
15322 </pre></blockquote>
15323
15324 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
15325 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
15326 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
15327 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
15328 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
15329 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
15330 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
15331 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
15332 structural object class.
15333
15334 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
15335
15336 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
15337 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
15338 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
15339 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
15340 in the configuration.</p>
15341
15342 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
15343 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
15344 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
15345 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
15346 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
15347 structure.</p>
15348
15349 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
15350 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
15351
15352 <blockquote><pre>
15353 ou=services
15354   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
15355     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
15356     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
15357       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
15358         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
15359     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
15360       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
15361         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
15362     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
15363       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
15364 </pre></blockquote>
15365
15366 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
15367 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
15368 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
15369 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
15370
15371 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
15372 like this:</p>
15373
15374 <blockquote><pre>
15375 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15376 dc: hostname
15377 objectClass: top
15378 objectClass: dhcpHost
15379 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15380 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
15381 associateddomain: hostname.intern
15382 arecord: 10.11.12.13
15383 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
15384 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
15385 </pre></blockquote>
15386
15387 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
15388 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
15389 auxiliary object class.</p>
15390
15391       </div>
15392       <div class="tags">
15393
15394
15395         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15396
15397
15398       </div>
15399     </div>
15400     <div class="padding"></div>
15401
15402     <div class="entry">
15403       <div class="title">
15404         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
15405       </div>
15406       <div class="date">
15407         14th July 2010
15408       </div>
15409       <div class="body">
15410         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
15411 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
15412 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
15413 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
15414 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
15415
15416 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
15417 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
15418
15419 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
15420 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
15421 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
15422 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
15423 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
15424 to a slave DNS server.</p>
15425
15426 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
15427 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
15428 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
15429 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
15430 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
15431 seem to work.</p>
15432
15433 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
15434 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
15435 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
15436 this:</p>
15437
15438 <blockquote><pre>
15439   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15440   cn: hostname
15441   objectClass: dhcphost
15442   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
15443   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
15444   associateddomain: hostname.intern
15445   arecord: 10.11.12.13
15446   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
15447   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
15448   ldapconfigsound: Y
15449 </pre></blockquote>
15450
15451 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
15452 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
15453 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
15454 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
15455
15456 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
15457 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
15458 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
15459 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
15460 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
15461 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
15462 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
15463 might be a good place to put it.</p>
15464
15465 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15466 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15467
15468       </div>
15469       <div class="tags">
15470
15471
15472         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15473
15474
15475       </div>
15476     </div>
15477     <div class="padding"></div>
15478
15479     <div class="entry">
15480       <div class="title">
15481         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
15482       </div>
15483       <div class="date">
15484         11th July 2010
15485       </div>
15486       <div class="body">
15487         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
15488 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
15489 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
15490 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
15491
15492 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
15493 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
15494 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
15495 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
15496 LTSP clients.</p>
15497
15498 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
15499 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
15500 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
15501
15502 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
15503 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
15504 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
15505
15506 <blockquote><pre>
15507 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
15508 #
15509 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
15510 #
15511 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
15512 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
15513 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
15514 #
15515 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
15516 # existence of attribute names.
15517 #
15518 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
15519 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
15520 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
15521 #
15522 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
15523 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
15524 #
15525 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
15526 #     SUP top
15527 #     AUXILIARY
15528 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
15529
15530 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
15531 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
15532     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
15533     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
15534         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
15535         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
15536             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
15537             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
15538             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
15539             # bass value on to clients
15540             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
15541         done
15542     done
15543 fi
15544 </pre></blockquote>
15545
15546 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
15547 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
15548 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
15549 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
15550 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
15551
15552 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15553 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15554
15555 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
15556 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
15557 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
15558 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
15559 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
15560 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
15561
15562       </div>
15563       <div class="tags">
15564
15565
15566         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15567
15568
15569       </div>
15570     </div>
15571     <div class="padding"></div>
15572
15573     <div class="entry">
15574       <div class="title">
15575         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
15576       </div>
15577       <div class="date">
15578          9th July 2010
15579       </div>
15580       <div class="body">
15581         <p>Since
15582 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
15583 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
15584 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
15585 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
15586 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
15587 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
15588 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
15589 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
15590 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
15591 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
15592 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
15593 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
15594 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
15595
15596       </div>
15597       <div class="tags">
15598
15599
15600         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15601
15602
15603       </div>
15604     </div>
15605     <div class="padding"></div>
15606
15607     <div class="entry">
15608       <div class="title">
15609         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
15610       </div>
15611       <div class="date">
15612          3rd July 2010
15613       </div>
15614       <div class="body">
15615         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
15616 href="https://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
15617 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
15618 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
15619 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
15620 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
15621 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
15622 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
15623
15624 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
15625 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
15626 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
15627 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
15628 publish the difference.</p>
15629
15630 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
15631
15632 <blockquote><p>
15633   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
15634   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
15635   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
15636   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
15637   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
15638   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
15639   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
15640   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
15641 </p></blockquote>
15642
15643 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
15644
15645 <blockquote><p>
15646   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
15647   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
15648   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
15649   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
15650   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
15651   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
15652   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
15653   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
15654   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
15655   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
15656   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
15657   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
15658   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
15659   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
15660   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
15661   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
15662   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
15663   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
15664   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
15665   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
15666 </p></blockquote>
15667
15668 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
15669
15670 <blockquote><p>
15671   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
15672   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
15673   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
15674   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
15675   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
15676   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
15677   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
15678   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
15679   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
15680   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
15681   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
15682   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
15683   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
15684   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
15685   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
15686   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
15687   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
15688   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
15689   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
15690   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
15691   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
15692 </p></blockquote>
15693
15694 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
15695
15696 <blockquote><p>
15697   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
15698   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
15699   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
15700 </p></blockquote>
15701
15702 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
15703 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
15704 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
15705 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
15706 the difference somewhat.
15707
15708       </div>
15709       <div class="tags">
15710
15711
15712         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15713
15714
15715       </div>
15716     </div>
15717     <div class="padding"></div>
15718
15719     <div class="entry">
15720       <div class="title">
15721         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
15722       </div>
15723       <div class="date">
15724         28th June 2010
15725       </div>
15726       <div class="body">
15727         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
15728 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
15729 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
15730 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
15731 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
15732 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
15733 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
15734 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
15735 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
15736 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
15737
15738 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
15739 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
15740 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
15741 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
15742 released.</p>
15743
15744 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
15745 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
15746 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
15747 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
15748
15749 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
15750 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15751
15752 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
15753 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
15754 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
15755 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
15756 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
15757
15758       </div>
15759       <div class="tags">
15760
15761
15762         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15763
15764
15765       </div>
15766     </div>
15767     <div class="padding"></div>
15768
15769     <div class="entry">
15770       <div class="title">
15771         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
15772       </div>
15773       <div class="date">
15774         24th June 2010
15775       </div>
15776       <div class="body">
15777         <p>A while back, I
15778 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
15779 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
15780 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
15781 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
15782
15783 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
15784 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
15785 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
15786 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
15787
15788 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
15789 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
15790 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
15791 Debian Edu.</p>
15792
15793 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
15794 the
15795 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
15796 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
15797 available today from IETF.</p>
15798
15799 <pre>
15800 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
15801 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
15802 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
15803  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
15804         NAME 'dhcpHost'
15805         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
15806 -       SUP top
15807 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
15808         MUST cn
15809         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
15810         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
15811 </pre>
15812
15813 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
15814 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
15815 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
15816
15817 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15818 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15819
15820       </div>
15821       <div class="tags">
15822
15823
15824         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15825
15826
15827       </div>
15828     </div>
15829     <div class="padding"></div>
15830
15831     <div class="entry">
15832       <div class="title">
15833         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
15834       </div>
15835       <div class="date">
15836         16th June 2010
15837       </div>
15838       <div class="body">
15839         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
15840 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
15841 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
15842 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
15843 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
15844 this:
15845
15846 <blockquote><pre>
15847 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
15848 tasksel --new-install
15849 </pre></blockquote>
15850
15851 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
15852 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
15853 any output what so ever.
15854
15855 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
15856 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
15857 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
15858 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
15859 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
15860 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
15861 code like this:
15862
15863 <blockquote><pre>
15864 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
15865 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
15866 $cmd
15867 </pre></blockquote>
15868
15869 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
15870 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
15871 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
15872 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
15873 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
15874 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
15875 installation.</p>
15876
15877 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
15878 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
15879 like this.</p>
15880
15881       </div>
15882       <div class="tags">
15883
15884
15885         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15886
15887
15888       </div>
15889     </div>
15890     <div class="padding"></div>
15891
15892     <div class="entry">
15893       <div class="title">
15894         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
15895       </div>
15896       <div class="date">
15897         13th June 2010
15898       </div>
15899       <div class="body">
15900         <p>My
15901 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
15902 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
15903 finally made the upgrade logs available from
15904 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
15905 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
15906 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
15907 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
15908
15909 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
15910 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
15911 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
15912 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
15913 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
15914 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
15915 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
15916 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
15917
15918 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
15919 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
15920 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
15921 too surprising.</p>
15922
15923 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
15924 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
15925 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
15926 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
15927 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
15928 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
15929 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
15930 continue.</p>
15931
15932 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
15933 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
15934   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
15935   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
15936   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
15937   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
15938   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
15939   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
15940   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
15941   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
15942   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
15943   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
15944   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
15945   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
15946   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
15947   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
15948   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
15949   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
15950   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
15951   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
15952   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
15953   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
15954   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
15955   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
15956   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
15957   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
15958   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
15959   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
15960   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
15961   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
15962
15963 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
15964
15965 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
15966   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
15967   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
15968   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
15969   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
15970   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
15971   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
15972   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
15973   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
15974   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
15975   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
15976   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
15977   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
15978   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
15979   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
15980   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
15981   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
15982   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
15983   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
15984   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
15985   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
15986   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
15987   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
15988   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
15989   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
15990   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
15991   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
15992   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
15993   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
15994   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
15995   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
15996   zip</p>
15997
15998 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
15999
16000 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
16001   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
16002   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
16003   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
16004   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
16005   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
16006   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
16007   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
16008   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
16009   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
16010   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
16011   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
16012   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
16013   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
16014   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
16015   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
16016   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
16017   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
16018   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
16019   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
16020   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
16021   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
16022   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
16023   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
16024   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
16025   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
16026   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
16027   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
16028
16029 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
16030 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
16031   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
16032   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
16033   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
16034   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
16035   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
16036   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
16037   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
16038   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
16039   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
16040   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
16041   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
16042   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
16043   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
16044   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
16045   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
16046   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
16047   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
16048   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
16049   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
16050   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
16051   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
16052   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
16053   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
16054   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
16055   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
16056   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
16057   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
16058   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
16059   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
16060   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
16061   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
16062   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
16063   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
16064   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
16065   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
16066   xulrunner-1.9</p>
16067
16068
16069       </div>
16070       <div class="tags">
16071
16072
16073         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16074
16075
16076       </div>
16077     </div>
16078     <div class="padding"></div>
16079
16080     <div class="entry">
16081       <div class="title">
16082         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
16083       </div>
16084       <div class="date">
16085         11th June 2010
16086       </div>
16087       <div class="body">
16088         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
16089 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
16090 have been discovered and reported in the process
16091 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
16092 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
16093 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
16094 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
16095 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
16096
16097 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
16098 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
16099 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
16100 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
16101 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
16102 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
16103
16104 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
16105 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
16106 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
16107 is created.  The bug report
16108 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
16109 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
16110 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
16111 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
16112 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
16113 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
16114 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
16115 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
16116 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
16117 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
16118 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
16119 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
16120 Debian Squeeze.</p>
16121
16122 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
16123 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
16124 trick:</p>
16125
16126 <blockquote><pre>
16127 #!/bin/sh
16128 set -ex
16129
16130 if [ "$1" ] ; then
16131     desktop=$1
16132 else
16133     desktop=gnome
16134 fi
16135
16136 from=lenny
16137 to=squeeze
16138
16139 exec &lt; /dev/null
16140 unset LANG
16141 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
16142 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
16143 fuser -mv .
16144 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
16145 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
16146 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
16147 #!/bin/sh
16148 exit 101
16149 EOF
16150 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
16151 exit_cleanup() {
16152     umount $tmpdir/proc
16153 }
16154 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
16155 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
16156 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
16157
16158 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
16159
16160 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
16161 # to return the correct answers.
16162 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
16163     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
16164
16165 # Include the desktop and laptop task
16166 for test in desktop laptop ; do
16167     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
16168 #!/bin/sh
16169 exit 2
16170 EOF
16171     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
16172 done
16173
16174 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
16175 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
16176 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
16177 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
16178
16179 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
16180 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
16181 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
16182 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
16183 fuser -mv
16184 </pre></blockquote>
16185
16186 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
16187 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
16188 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
16189 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
16190 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
16191 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
16192
16193 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
16194 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
16195 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
16196 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
16197 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
16198 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
16199 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
16200
16201 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
16202 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
16203 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
16204 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
16205 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
16206 packages.</p>
16207
16208       </div>
16209       <div class="tags">
16210
16211
16212         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16213
16214
16215       </div>
16216     </div>
16217     <div class="padding"></div>
16218
16219     <div class="entry">
16220       <div class="title">
16221         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
16222       </div>
16223       <div class="date">
16224          6th June 2010
16225       </div>
16226       <div class="body">
16227         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
16228 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
16229 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
16230 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
16231 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
16232 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
16233 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
16234
16235 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
16236 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
16237 COLUMNS):</p>
16238
16239 <blockquote><pre>
16240 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
16241 previous=N
16242 PREVLEVEL=
16243 RUNLEVEL=
16244 runlevel=S
16245 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
16246 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
16247 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
16248 </pre></blockquote>
16249
16250 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
16251 script.</p>
16252
16253 <blockquote><pre>
16254 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
16255 previous=N
16256 PREVLEVEL=N
16257 RUNLEVEL=S
16258 runlevel=S
16259 </pre></blockquote>
16260
16261 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
16262 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
16263 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
16264
16265 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
16266 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
16267 choice.</p>
16268
16269       </div>
16270       <div class="tags">
16271
16272
16273         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16274
16275
16276       </div>
16277     </div>
16278     <div class="padding"></div>
16279
16280     <div class="entry">
16281       <div class="title">
16282         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
16283       </div>
16284       <div class="date">
16285          6th June 2010
16286       </div>
16287       <div class="body">
16288         <p>Via the
16289 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
16290 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
16291 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
16292 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
16293 following the standards wars of today.</p>
16294
16295       </div>
16296       <div class="tags">
16297
16298
16299         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
16300
16301
16302       </div>
16303     </div>
16304     <div class="padding"></div>
16305
16306     <div class="entry">
16307       <div class="title">
16308         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
16309       </div>
16310       <div class="date">
16311          3rd June 2010
16312       </div>
16313       <div class="body">
16314         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
16315 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
16316 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
16317 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
16318 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
16319
16320 <blockquote><pre>
16321 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
16322   vendor                    count
16323   Dell Computer Corporation     1
16324     PowerEdge 1750              1
16325   IBM                           1
16326     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
16327   Intel                         2
16328   [no-dmi-info]                 3
16329 maintainer:~#
16330 </pre></blockquote>
16331
16332 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
16333 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
16334 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
16335 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
16336 option to list the individual machines.</p>
16337
16338 <p>A larger list is
16339 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
16340 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
16341 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
16342 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
16343 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
16344 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
16345 collector.</p>
16346
16347       </div>
16348       <div class="tags">
16349
16350
16351         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
16352
16353
16354       </div>
16355     </div>
16356     <div class="padding"></div>
16357
16358     <div class="entry">
16359       <div class="title">
16360         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
16361       </div>
16362       <div class="date">
16363          1st June 2010
16364       </div>
16365       <div class="body">
16366         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
16367 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
16368 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
16369 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
16370 wait.</p>
16371
16372 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
16373 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
16374 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
16375 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
16376 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
16377 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
16378
16379 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
16380 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
16381 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
16382 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
16383 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
16384 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
16385 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
16386 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
16387
16388 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
16389
16390       </div>
16391       <div class="tags">
16392
16393
16394         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16395
16396
16397       </div>
16398     </div>
16399     <div class="padding"></div>
16400
16401     <div class="entry">
16402       <div class="title">
16403         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
16404       </div>
16405       <div class="date">
16406         27th May 2010
16407       </div>
16408       <div class="body">
16409         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
16410 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
16411 issues are known and should be solved:
16412
16413 <p><ul>
16414
16415 <li>The wicd package seen to
16416 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
16417 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
16418 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
16419 seem to be on the case.</li>
16420
16421 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
16422 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
16423 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
16424 maintainer is on the case.</li>
16425
16426 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
16427 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
16428 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
16429 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
16430 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
16431 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
16432 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
16433 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
16434
16435 </ul></p>
16436
16437 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
16438 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
16439 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
16440 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
16441
16442 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
16443 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
16444 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
16445 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
16446
16447 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
16448
16449       </div>
16450       <div class="tags">
16451
16452
16453         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16454
16455
16456       </div>
16457     </div>
16458     <div class="padding"></div>
16459
16460     <div class="entry">
16461       <div class="title">
16462         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
16463       </div>
16464       <div class="date">
16465         22nd May 2010
16466       </div>
16467       <div class="body">
16468         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
16469 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
16470 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
16471 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
16472
16473 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
16474 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
16475 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
16476 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
16477 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
16478 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
16479 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
16480 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
16481 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
16482 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
16483 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
16484 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
16485 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
16486 going to work.</p>
16487
16488 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
16489 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
16490 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
16491 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
16492 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
16493 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
16494 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
16495 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
16496 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
16497 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
16498 Edu.</p>
16499
16500 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
16501 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
16502 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
16503 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
16504 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
16505 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
16506
16507 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
16508 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
16509
16510       </div>
16511       <div class="tags">
16512
16513
16514         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16515
16516
16517       </div>
16518     </div>
16519     <div class="padding"></div>
16520
16521     <div class="entry">
16522       <div class="title">
16523         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
16524       </div>
16525       <div class="date">
16526         14th May 2010
16527       </div>
16528       <div class="body">
16529         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
16530 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
16531 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
16532 expected, if I am to believe the
16533 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
16534 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
16535 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
16536 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
16537 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
16538 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
16539 version.</p>
16540
16541 More information about
16542 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
16543 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
16544 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
16545 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
16546
16547 <blockquote><pre>
16548 CONCURRENCY=none
16549 </pre></blockquote>
16550
16551 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
16552 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
16553 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
16554 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
16555
16556       </div>
16557       <div class="tags">
16558
16559
16560         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16561
16562
16563       </div>
16564     </div>
16565     <div class="padding"></div>
16566
16567     <div class="entry">
16568       <div class="title">
16569         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
16570       </div>
16571       <div class="date">
16572         14th May 2010
16573       </div>
16574       <div class="body">
16575         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
16576 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
16577 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
16578 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
16579 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
16580 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
16581 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
16582 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
16583
16584 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
16585 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
16586 this on the collector host:</p>
16587
16588 <blockquote><pre>
16589 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
16590 </pre></blockquote>
16591
16592 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
16593 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
16594
16595 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
16596 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
16597 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
16598 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
16599 written yet.</p>
16600
16601       </div>
16602       <div class="tags">
16603
16604
16605         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
16606
16607
16608       </div>
16609     </div>
16610     <div class="padding"></div>
16611
16612     <div class="entry">
16613       <div class="title">
16614         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
16615       </div>
16616       <div class="date">
16617         13th May 2010
16618       </div>
16619       <div class="body">
16620         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
16621 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
16622 has been
16623 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
16624
16625 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
16626 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
16627 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
16628 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
16629 based boot system.  Tollef is
16630 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
16631 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
16632 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
16633 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
16634 at the moment do not.</p>
16635
16636 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
16637 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
16638 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
16639 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
16640 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
16641 way forward.</p>
16642
16643 <p>In the mean time, based on the
16644 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
16645 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
16646 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
16647 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
16648 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
16649 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
16650 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
16651 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
16652
16653       </div>
16654       <div class="tags">
16655
16656
16657         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16658
16659
16660       </div>
16661     </div>
16662     <div class="padding"></div>
16663
16664     <div class="entry">
16665       <div class="title">
16666         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
16667       </div>
16668       <div class="date">
16669          6th May 2010
16670       </div>
16671       <div class="body">
16672         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
16673 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
16674 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
16675 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
16676 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
16677 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
16678 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
16679
16680 <blockquote><pre>
16681 CONCURRENCY=makefile
16682 </pre></blockquote>
16683
16684 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
16685 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
16686 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
16687 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
16688 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
16689 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
16690 make this happen.</p>
16691
16692 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
16693 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
16694 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
16695 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
16696 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
16697
16698 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
16699 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
16700 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
16701 fix the remaining issues.</p>
16702
16703 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
16704 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
16705 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
16706 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
16707
16708       </div>
16709       <div class="tags">
16710
16711
16712         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16713
16714
16715       </div>
16716     </div>
16717     <div class="padding"></div>
16718
16719     <div class="entry">
16720       <div class="title">
16721         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
16722       </div>
16723       <div class="date">
16724         27th July 2009
16725       </div>
16726       <div class="body">
16727         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
16728 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
16729 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
16730 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
16731 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
16732 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
16733 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
16734
16735 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
16736 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
16737 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
16738
16739       </div>
16740       <div class="tags">
16741
16742
16743         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16744
16745
16746       </div>
16747     </div>
16748     <div class="padding"></div>
16749
16750     <div class="entry">
16751       <div class="title">
16752         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
16753       </div>
16754       <div class="date">
16755         22nd July 2009
16756       </div>
16757       <div class="body">
16758         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
16759 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
16760 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
16761 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
16762 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
16763 the package up to date.</p>
16764
16765 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
16766 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
16767 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
16768 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
16769 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
16770 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
16771 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
16772 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
16773 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
16774 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
16775 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
16776 working on the future release.</p>
16777
16778 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
16779 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
16780
16781       </div>
16782       <div class="tags">
16783
16784
16785         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16786
16787
16788       </div>
16789     </div>
16790     <div class="padding"></div>
16791
16792     <div class="entry">
16793       <div class="title">
16794         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
16795       </div>
16796       <div class="date">
16797         24th June 2009
16798       </div>
16799       <div class="body">
16800         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
16801 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
16802 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
16803 funded
16804 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
16805 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
16806 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
16807 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
16808 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
16809 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
16810
16811 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
16812 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
16813 boot:</p>
16814
16815 <ul>
16816
16817 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
16818
16819 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
16820    clock is in UTC.</li>
16821
16822 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
16823    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
16824    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
16825
16826 </ul>
16827
16828 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
16829 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
16830 Villegas</a>.
16831
16832 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
16833 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
16834 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
16835 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
16836 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
16837 using this.</p>
16838
16839 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
16840 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
16841 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
16842 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
16843 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
16844 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
16845 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
16846
16847       </div>
16848       <div class="tags">
16849
16850
16851         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16852
16853
16854       </div>
16855     </div>
16856     <div class="padding"></div>
16857
16858     <div class="entry">
16859       <div class="title">
16860         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
16861       </div>
16862       <div class="date">
16863         17th May 2009
16864       </div>
16865       <div class="body">
16866         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
16867 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
16868 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
16869 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
16870 dager siden kom
16871 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
16872 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
16873 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
16874 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
16875 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
16876
16877 <blockquote>
16878 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
16879 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
16880 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
16881 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
16882 </blockquote>
16883
16884 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
16885 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
16886 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
16887 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
16888 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
16889
16890 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
16891 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
16892 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
16893
16894       </div>
16895       <div class="tags">
16896
16897
16898         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
16899
16900
16901       </div>
16902     </div>
16903     <div class="padding"></div>
16904
16905     <div class="entry">
16906       <div class="title">
16907         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
16908       </div>
16909       <div class="date">
16910          7th May 2009
16911       </div>
16912       <div class="body">
16913         <p>Kom over
16914 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
16915 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
16916 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
16917 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
16918 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
16919 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
16920 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
16921
16922       </div>
16923       <div class="tags">
16924
16925
16926         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
16927
16928
16929       </div>
16930     </div>
16931     <div class="padding"></div>
16932
16933     <div class="entry">
16934       <div class="title">
16935         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
16936       </div>
16937       <div class="date">
16938          2nd May 2009
16939       </div>
16940       <div class="body">
16941         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
16942 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
16943 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
16944 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
16945 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
16946 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
16947 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
16948 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
16949 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
16950 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
16951 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
16952 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
16953 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
16954 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
16955 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
16956 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
16957 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
16958 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
16959 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
16960 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
16961
16962 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
16963 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
16964 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
16965 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
16966 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
16967 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
16968 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
16969 betydelige.</p>
16970
16971       </div>
16972       <div class="tags">
16973
16974
16975         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
16976
16977
16978       </div>
16979     </div>
16980     <div class="padding"></div>
16981
16982     <div class="entry">
16983       <div class="title">
16984         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
16985       </div>
16986       <div class="date">
16987          2nd May 2009
16988       </div>
16989       <div class="body">
16990         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
16991 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
16992 do not yet know them.</p>
16993
16994 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
16995 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
16996 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
16997 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
16998 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
16999 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
17000 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
17001 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
17002 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
17003 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
17004 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
17005
17006 <p>The second one is
17007 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
17008 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
17009 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
17010 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
17011 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
17012 and the company behind it is running
17013 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
17014 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
17015 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
17016 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
17017 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
17018 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
17019 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
17020 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
17021
17022 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
17023 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
17024 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
17025 surrounded by today.</p>
17026
17027       </div>
17028       <div class="tags">
17029
17030
17031         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17032
17033
17034       </div>
17035     </div>
17036     <div class="padding"></div>
17037
17038     <div class="entry">
17039       <div class="title">
17040         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
17041       </div>
17042       <div class="date">
17043         28th April 2009
17044       </div>
17045       <div class="body">
17046         <p>Julien Blache
17047 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
17048 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
17049 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
17050 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
17051 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
17052 properties.</p>
17053
17054       </div>
17055       <div class="tags">
17056
17057
17058         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17059
17060
17061       </div>
17062     </div>
17063     <div class="padding"></div>
17064
17065     <div class="entry">
17066       <div class="title">
17067         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
17068       </div>
17069       <div class="date">
17070         30th March 2009
17071       </div>
17072       <div class="body">
17073         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
17074 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
17075 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
17076 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
17077 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
17078 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
17079 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
17080 application.</p>
17081
17082 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
17083 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
17084 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
17085 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
17086 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
17087 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
17088 blocked from doing so.</p>
17089
17090 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
17091 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
17092 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
17093 requirements change.</p>
17094
17095 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
17096 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
17097 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
17098
17099       </div>
17100       <div class="tags">
17101
17102
17103         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
17104
17105
17106       </div>
17107     </div>
17108     <div class="padding"></div>
17109
17110     <div class="entry">
17111       <div class="title">
17112         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
17113       </div>
17114       <div class="date">
17115         29th March 2009
17116       </div>
17117       <div class="body">
17118         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
17119 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
17120 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
17121 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
17122 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
17123 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
17124 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
17125 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
17126 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
17127 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
17128 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
17129 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
17130 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
17131 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
17132 now. :)</p>
17133
17134       </div>
17135       <div class="tags">
17136
17137
17138         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17139
17140
17141       </div>
17142     </div>
17143     <div class="padding"></div>
17144
17145     <div class="entry">
17146       <div class="title">
17147         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
17148       </div>
17149       <div class="date">
17150         29th March 2009
17151       </div>
17152       <div class="body">
17153         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
17154 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
17155 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
17156 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
17157 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
17158 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
17159
17160 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
17161 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
17162 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
17163 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
17164 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
17165 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
17166 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
17167 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
17168 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
17169 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
17170 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
17171 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
17172 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
17173
17174 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
17175 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
17176 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
17177 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
17178
17179 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
17180 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
17181
17182 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
17183 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
17184 new IETF work group?</p>
17185
17186       </div>
17187       <div class="tags">
17188
17189
17190         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
17191
17192
17193       </div>
17194     </div>
17195     <div class="padding"></div>
17196
17197     <div class="entry">
17198       <div class="title">
17199         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
17200       </div>
17201       <div class="date">
17202         15th February 2009
17203       </div>
17204       <div class="body">
17205         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
17206 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
17207 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
17208 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
17209 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
17210 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
17211 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
17212 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
17213 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
17214 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
17215 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
17216 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
17217
17218       </div>
17219       <div class="tags">
17220
17221
17222         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
17223
17224
17225       </div>
17226     </div>
17227     <div class="padding"></div>
17228
17229     <div class="entry">
17230       <div class="title">
17231         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~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>
17232       </div>
17233       <div class="date">
17234          7th December 2008
17235       </div>
17236       <div class="body">
17237         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
17238 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
17239 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
17240 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
17241 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
17242 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
17243 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
17244 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
17245
17246 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
17247 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
17248 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
17249 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
17250 of these cards.</p>
17251
17252       </div>
17253       <div class="tags">
17254
17255
17256         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
17257
17258
17259       </div>
17260     </div>
17261     <div class="padding"></div>
17262
17263     <div class="entry">
17264       <div class="title">
17265         <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
17266       </div>
17267       <div class="date">
17268         25th November 2008
17269       </div>
17270       <div class="body">
17271         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
17272 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
17273 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
17274 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
17275 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
17276 notes are available on
17277 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
17278 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
17279 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
17280 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
17281 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
17282 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
17283 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
17284 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
17285 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
17286
17287 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
17288 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
17289
17290       </div>
17291       <div class="tags">
17292
17293
17294         Tags: <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17295
17296
17297       </div>
17298     </div>
17299     <div class="padding"></div>
17300
17301     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
17302     <div id="sidebar">
17303
17304
17305
17306 <h2>Archive</h2>
17307 <ul>
17308
17309 <li>2025
17310 <ul>
17311
17312 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2025/01/">January (4)</a></li>
17313
17314 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2025/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17315
17316 </ul></li>
17317
17318 <li>2024
17319 <ul>
17320
17321 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/01/">January (1)</a></li>
17322
17323 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17324
17325 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/03/">March (2)</a></li>
17326
17327 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/04/">April (3)</a></li>
17328
17329 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/05/">May (1)</a></li>
17330
17331 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/06/">June (1)</a></li>
17332
17333 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/07/">July (2)</a></li>
17334
17335 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2024/12/">December (1)</a></li>
17336
17337 </ul></li>
17338
17339 <li>2023
17340 <ul>
17341
17342 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/01/">January (3)</a></li>
17343
17344 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17345
17346 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/04/">April (2)</a></li>
17347
17348 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/05/">May (3)</a></li>
17349
17350 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/06/">June (1)</a></li>
17351
17352 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/08/">August (1)</a></li>
17353
17354 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17355
17356 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/10/">October (1)</a></li>
17357
17358 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/11/">November (4)</a></li>
17359
17360 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2023/12/">December (1)</a></li>
17361
17362 </ul></li>
17363
17364 <li>2022
17365 <ul>
17366
17367 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17368
17369 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/03/">March (3)</a></li>
17370
17371 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/04/">April (2)</a></li>
17372
17373 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17374
17375 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/07/">July (1)</a></li>
17376
17377 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17378
17379 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/10/">October (1)</a></li>
17380
17381 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2022/12/">December (1)</a></li>
17382
17383 </ul></li>
17384
17385 <li>2021
17386 <ul>
17387
17388 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/01/">January (2)</a></li>
17389
17390 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17391
17392 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/05/">May (1)</a></li>
17393
17394 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/06/">June (1)</a></li>
17395
17396 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/07/">July (3)</a></li>
17397
17398 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/08/">August (1)</a></li>
17399
17400 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17401
17402 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/10/">October (1)</a></li>
17403
17404 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2021/12/">December (1)</a></li>
17405
17406 </ul></li>
17407
17408 <li>2020
17409 <ul>
17410
17411 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/02/">February (2)</a></li>
17412
17413 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/03/">March (2)</a></li>
17414
17415 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/04/">April (2)</a></li>
17416
17417 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/05/">May (3)</a></li>
17418
17419 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17420
17421 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/07/">July (1)</a></li>
17422
17423 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17424
17425 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/10/">October (1)</a></li>
17426
17427 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2020/11/">November (1)</a></li>
17428
17429 </ul></li>
17430
17431 <li>2019
17432 <ul>
17433
17434 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/01/">January (4)</a></li>
17435
17436 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/02/">February (3)</a></li>
17437
17438 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/03/">March (3)</a></li>
17439
17440 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/05/">May (2)</a></li>
17441
17442 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/06/">June (5)</a></li>
17443
17444 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/07/">July (2)</a></li>
17445
17446 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/08/">August (1)</a></li>
17447
17448 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17449
17450 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/11/">November (1)</a></li>
17451
17452 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2019/12/">December (4)</a></li>
17453
17454 </ul></li>
17455
17456 <li>2018
17457 <ul>
17458
17459 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
17460
17461 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
17462
17463 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
17464
17465 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
17466
17467 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17468
17469 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
17470
17471 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (3)</a></li>
17472
17473 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/09/">September (3)</a></li>
17474
17475 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/10/">October (5)</a></li>
17476
17477 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/11/">November (2)</a></li>
17478
17479 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2018/12/">December (4)</a></li>
17480
17481 </ul></li>
17482
17483 <li>2017
17484 <ul>
17485
17486 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
17487
17488 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
17489
17490 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
17491
17492 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
17493
17494 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
17495
17496 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
17497
17498 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
17499
17500 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
17501
17502 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
17503
17504 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
17505
17506 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
17507
17508 </ul></li>
17509
17510 <li>2016
17511 <ul>
17512
17513 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
17514
17515 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
17516
17517 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
17518
17519 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
17520
17521 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
17522
17523 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17524
17525 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
17526
17527 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
17528
17529 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
17530
17531 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
17532
17533 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
17534
17535 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
17536
17537 </ul></li>
17538
17539 <li>2015
17540 <ul>
17541
17542 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
17543
17544 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
17545
17546 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
17547
17548 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
17549
17550 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
17551
17552 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
17553
17554 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
17555
17556 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
17557
17558 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
17559
17560 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
17561
17562 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
17563
17564 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
17565
17566 </ul></li>
17567
17568 <li>2014
17569 <ul>
17570
17571 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
17572
17573 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
17574
17575 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
17576
17577 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
17578
17579 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
17580
17581 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17582
17583 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
17584
17585 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
17586
17587 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
17588
17589 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
17590
17591 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
17592
17593 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
17594
17595 </ul></li>
17596
17597 <li>2013
17598 <ul>
17599
17600 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
17601
17602 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
17603
17604 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
17605
17606 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
17607
17608 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
17609
17610 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
17611
17612 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
17613
17614 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
17615
17616 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
17617
17618 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
17619
17620 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
17621
17622 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
17623
17624 </ul></li>
17625
17626 <li>2012
17627 <ul>
17628
17629 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
17630
17631 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
17632
17633 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
17634
17635 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
17636
17637 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
17638
17639 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
17640
17641 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
17642
17643 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
17644
17645 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
17646
17647 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
17648
17649 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
17650
17651 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
17652
17653 </ul></li>
17654
17655 <li>2011
17656 <ul>
17657
17658 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
17659
17660 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
17661
17662 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
17663
17664 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
17665
17666 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
17667
17668 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17669
17670 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
17671
17672 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
17673
17674 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
17675
17676 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
17677
17678 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
17679
17680 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
17681
17682 </ul></li>
17683
17684 <li>2010
17685 <ul>
17686
17687 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
17688
17689 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17690
17691 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
17692
17693 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
17694
17695 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
17696
17697 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
17698
17699 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
17700
17701 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
17702
17703 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
17704
17705 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
17706
17707 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
17708
17709 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
17710
17711 </ul></li>
17712
17713 <li>2009
17714 <ul>
17715
17716 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
17717
17718 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
17719
17720 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
17721
17722 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
17723
17724 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
17725
17726 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
17727
17728 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
17729
17730 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
17731
17732 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17733
17734 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
17735
17736 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
17737
17738 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
17739
17740 </ul></li>
17741
17742 <li>2008
17743 <ul>
17744
17745 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
17746
17747 <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
17748
17749 </ul></li>
17750
17751 </ul>
17752
17753
17754
17755 <h2>Tags</h2>
17756 <ul>
17757
17758  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (19)</a></li>
17759
17760  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
17761
17762  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
17763
17764  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
17765
17766  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/betalkontant">betalkontant (9)</a></li>
17767
17768  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (13)</a></li>
17769
17770  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
17771
17772  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
17773
17774  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (3)</a></li>
17775
17776  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (207)</a></li>
17777
17778  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (159)</a></li>
17779
17780  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (9)</a></li>
17781
17782  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (11)</a></li>
17783
17784  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (18)</a></li>
17785
17786  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (33)</a></li>
17787
17788  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
17789
17790  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/english">english (469)</a></li>
17791
17792  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
17793
17794  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (14)</a></li>
17795
17796  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (34)</a></li>
17797
17798  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
17799
17800  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (20)</a></li>
17801
17802  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
17803
17804  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (43)</a></li>
17805
17806  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (20)</a></li>
17807
17808  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (23)</a></li>
17809
17810  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi (6)</a></li>
17811
17812  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
17813
17814  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (5)</a></li>
17815
17816  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
17817
17818  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc (8)</a></li>
17819
17820  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
17821
17822  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
17823
17824  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/madewithcc">madewithcc (3)</a></li>
17825
17826  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
17827
17828  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (47)</a></li>
17829
17830  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (15)</a></li>
17831
17832  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5 (26)</a></li>
17833
17834  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (326)</a></li>
17835
17836  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (200)</a></li>
17837
17838  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (42)</a></li>
17839
17840  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
17841
17842  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch (4)</a></li>
17843
17844  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (76)</a></li>
17845
17846  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (114)</a></li>
17847
17848  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (4)</a></li>
17849
17850  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
17851
17852  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
17853
17854  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
17855
17856  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (17)</a></li>
17857
17858  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
17859
17860  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (7)</a></li>
17861
17862  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
17863
17864  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (60)</a></li>
17865
17866  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
17867
17868  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
17869
17870  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (78)</a></li>
17871
17872  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (7)</a></li>
17873
17874  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (14)</a></li>
17875
17876  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (65)</a></li>
17877
17878  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (5)</a></li>
17879
17880  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
17881
17882  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
17883
17884  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (22)</a></li>
17885
17886  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/video">video (81)</a></li>
17887
17888  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
17889
17890  <li><a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/tags/web">web (42)</a></li>
17891
17892 </ul>
17893
17894
17895     </div>
17896     <p style="text-align: right">
17897  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
17898 </p>
17899
17900   </body>
17901 </html>