blog/tags/debian/index.html

   1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
   2           "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
   3 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
   4   <head>
   5     <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Entries Tagged debian</title>
   7     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/style.css" />
   8     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/vim.css" />
   9     <link rel="alternate" title="RSS Feed" href="debian.rss" type="application/rss+xml" />
  10   </head>
  11   <body>
  12     <div class="title">
  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          5th July 2015
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
  32 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
  33 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
  34 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
  35 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
  36 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
  37 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
  38 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
  39 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
  40 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
  41 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
  42
  43 <p>One tip I got was to use the
  44 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
  45 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
  46 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
  47 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
  48 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
  49 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
  50
  51 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
  52 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
  53 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
  54 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
  55 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
  56 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
  57 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
  58 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
  59 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
  60 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
  61 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
  62 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
  63 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
  64 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
  65 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
  66
  67 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
  68 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
  69 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
  70 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
  71
  72 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
  73 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
  74
  75 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
  76 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
  77 different
  78 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
  79 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
  80
  81       </div>
  82       <div class="tags">
  83
  84
  85         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
  86
  87
  88       </div>
  89     </div>
  90     <div class="padding"></div>
  91
  92     <div class="entry">
  93       <div class="title">
  94         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
  95       </div>
  96       <div class="date">
  97          3rd July 2015
  98       </div>
  99       <div class="body">
 100         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
 101 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
 102 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
 103 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
 104 flickering.</p>
 105
 106 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
 107 still as
 108 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
 109 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
 110 good help from
 111 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
 112 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
 113 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
 114 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
 115 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
 116 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
 117 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
 118 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
 119 deteriorated since X41.</p>
 120
 121 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
 122 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
 123 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
 124 have suggestions.</p>
 125
 126 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
 127 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
 128 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
 129
 130       </div>
 131       <div class="tags">
 132
 133
 134         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 135
 136
 137       </div>
 138     </div>
 139     <div class="padding"></div>
 140
 141     <div class="entry">
 142       <div class="title">
 143         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
 144       </div>
 145       <div class="date">
 146         22nd November 2014
 147       </div>
 148       <div class="body">
 149         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
 150 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
 151 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
 152 courtesy of
 153 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
 154 Schubert</a> and
 155 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
 156 McVittie</a>.
 157
 158 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
 159 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
 160 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
 161 you upgrade:</p>
 162
 163 <p><blockquote><pre>
 164 Package: systemd-sysv
 165 Pin: release o=Debian
 166 Pin-Priority: -1
 167 </pre></blockquote><p>
 168
 169 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
 170 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
 171 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
 172 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
 173 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
 174
 175 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
 176 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
 177 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
 178 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
 179 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
 180 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
 181
 182 <p><blockquote><pre>
 183 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
 184 </pre></blockquote><p>
 185
 186 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
 187
 188 <p><blockquote><pre>
 189 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
 190 </pre></blockquote><p>
 191
 192 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
 193 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
 194
 195 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
 196 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
 197 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
 198 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
 199 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
 200 Jessie is released.</p>
 201
 202 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
 203 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
 204 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
 205 line.</p>
 206
 207       </div>
 208       <div class="tags">
 209
 210
 211         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 212
 213
 214       </div>
 215     </div>
 216     <div class="padding"></div>
 217
 218     <div class="entry">
 219       <div class="title">
 220         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
 221       </div>
 222       <div class="date">
 223         10th November 2014
 224       </div>
 225       <div class="body">
 226         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
 227 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
 228 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
 229
 230 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
 231 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
 232 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
 233 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
 234 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
 235 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
 236 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
 237 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
 238 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
 239 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
 240 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
 241 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
 242 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
 243 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
 244 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
 245
 246 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
 247 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
 248 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
 249 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
 250 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
 251 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
 252 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
 253 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
 254 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
 255 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
 256 were fairly easy, and
 257 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
 258 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
 259 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
 260 useful approach.</p>
 261
 262 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
 263 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
 264 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
 265 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
 266 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
 267 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
 268 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
 269 this:</p>
 270
 271 <p><blockquote><pre>
 272 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
 273   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
 274 </pre></blockquote></p>
 275
 276 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
 277 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
 278
 279 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
 280 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
 281 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
 282 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
 283 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
 284 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
 285 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
 286 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
 287 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
 288 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
 289 system.</p>
 290
 291 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
 292 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
 293 SMTorP. :)</p>
 294
 295       </div>
 296       <div class="tags">
 297
 298
 299         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 300
 301
 302       </div>
 303     </div>
 304     <div class="padding"></div>
 305
 306     <div class="entry">
 307       <div class="title">
 308         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
 309       </div>
 310       <div class="date">
 311         22nd October 2014
 312       </div>
 313       <div class="body">
 314         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
 315 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
 316 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
 317 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
 318 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
 319 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
 320 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
 321 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
 322 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
 323 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
 324 lists I recently took over:</p>
 325
 326 <p><blockquote><pre>
 327 % time listadmin xiph
 328 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
 329 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
 330
 331 real    0m1.709s
 332 user    0m0.232s
 333 sys     0m0.012s
 334 %
 335 </pre></blockquote></p>
 336
 337 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
 338 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
 339 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
 340 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
 341 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
 342 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
 343 program.</p>
 344
 345 <p>If you install
 346 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
 347 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
 348 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
 349
 350 <p><blockquote><pre>
 351 username username@example.org
 352 spamlevel 23
 353 default discard
 354 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
 355
 356 password secret
 357 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
 358 mailman-list@lists.example.com
 359
 360 password hidden
 361 other-list@otherserver.example.org
 362 </pre></blockquote></p>
 363
 364 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
 365 learn the details.</p>
 366
 367 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
 368 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
 369 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
 370 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
 371
 372 <p><blockquote><pre>
 373 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
 374 </pre></blockquote></p>
 375
 376 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
 377 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
 378 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
 379 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
 380 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
 381 email.</p>
 382
 383 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
 384 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
 385 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
 386 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
 387 software.</p>
 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&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 392
 393 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
 394 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
 395 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
 396 sure why.</p>
 397
 398       </div>
 399       <div class="tags">
 400
 401
 402         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 403
 404
 405       </div>
 406     </div>
 407     <div class="padding"></div>
 408
 409     <div class="entry">
 410       <div class="title">
 411         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
 412       </div>
 413       <div class="date">
 414         17th October 2014
 415       </div>
 416       <div class="body">
 417         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
 418 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
 419 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
 420 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
 421 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
 422 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
 423 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
 424
 425 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
 426 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
 427 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
 428 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
 429 of this story.)</p>
 430
 431 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
 432 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
 433 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
 434 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
 435 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
 436 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
 437 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
 438 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
 439 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
 440 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
 441
 442 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
 443 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
 444 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
 445 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
 446
 447 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
 448 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
 449
 450 <p><blockquote><pre>
 451 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
 452 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
 453 </pre></blockquote></p>
 454
 455 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
 456 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
 457 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
 458 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
 459 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
 460 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
 461 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
 462 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
 463
 464 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
 465 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
 466
 467 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
 468 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
 469 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
 470 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
 471 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
 472
 473 <p><blockquote><pre>
 474 Task: isenkram-packages
 475 Section: hardware
 476 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 477  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
 478  proposed.
 479 Test-new-install: show show
 480 Relevance: 8
 481 Packages: for-current-hardware
 482
 483 Task: isenkram-firmware
 484 Section: hardware
 485 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 486  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
 487  packages are proposed.
 488 Test-new-install: mark show
 489 Relevance: 8
 490 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
 491 </pre></blockquote></p>
 492
 493 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
 494 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
 495 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
 496 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
 497 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
 498
 499 <p><blockquote><pre>
 500 #!/bin/sh
 501 #
 502 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
 503 export PATH
 504 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
 505 </pre></blockquote></p>
 506
 507 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
 508 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
 509
 510 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
 511 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
 512 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
 513 install.</p>
 514
 515 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
 516 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
 517 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
 518
 519       </div>
 520       <div class="tags">
 521
 522
 523         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
 524
 525
 526       </div>
 527     </div>
 528     <div class="padding"></div>
 529
 530     <div class="entry">
 531       <div class="title">
 532         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
 533       </div>
 534       <div class="date">
 535          4th October 2014
 536       </div>
 537       <div class="body">
 538         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
 539 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
 540 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
 541 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
 542
 543 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
 544
 545 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
 546 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
 547 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
 548
 549       </div>
 550       <div class="tags">
 551
 552
 553         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 554
 555
 556       </div>
 557     </div>
 558     <div class="padding"></div>
 559
 560     <div class="entry">
 561       <div class="title">
 562         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
 563       </div>
 564       <div class="date">
 565          4th October 2014
 566       </div>
 567       <div class="body">
 568         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
 569 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
 570 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
 571 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
 572 Dibb.</p>
 573
 574 <p>I just wrapped up
 575 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
 576 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
 577 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
 578 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
 579 0.17.</p>
 580
 581 <ul>
 582
 583  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
 584  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
 585    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
 586  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
 587  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
 588  <li>Fix include orders</li>
 589  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
 590  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
 591  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
 592    the palette size is the same.</li>
 593  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
 594  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
 595  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
 596  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
 597    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
 598
 599 </ul>
 600
 601 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
 602 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
 603 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
 604
 605       </div>
 606       <div class="tags">
 607
 608
 609         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
 610
 611
 612       </div>
 613     </div>
 614     <div class="padding"></div>
 615
 616     <div class="entry">
 617       <div class="title">
 618         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
 619       </div>
 620       <div class="date">
 621         26th September 2014
 622       </div>
 623       <div class="body">
 624         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
 625 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
 626 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
 627 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
 628 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
 629 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
 630 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
 631 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
 632 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
 633 future.  The
 634 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
 635 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
 636 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
 637 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
 638 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
 639
 640 <p>First, download the test ISO via
 641 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
 642 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
 643 or rsync (use
 644 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
 645 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
 646 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
 647 install with some tweaking.</p>
 648
 649 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
 650 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
 651
 652 <p><blockquote><pre>
 653 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
 654 </pre></blockquote></p>
 655
 656 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
 657 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
 658 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
 659 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
 660
 661 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
 662 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
 663 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
 664 your need.</p>
 665
 666 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
 667 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
 668 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
 669 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
 670 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
 671 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
 672 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
 673 days.</p>
 674
 675 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
 676 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
 677 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
 678 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
 679 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
 680 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
 681 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
 682 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
 683 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
 684
 685 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
 686 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
 687 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
 688
 689       </div>
 690       <div class="tags">
 691
 692
 693         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 694
 695
 696       </div>
 697     </div>
 698     <div class="padding"></div>
 699
 700     <div class="entry">
 701       <div class="title">
 702         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
 703       </div>
 704       <div class="date">
 705         25th September 2014
 706       </div>
 707       <div class="body">
 708         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
 709 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
 710 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
 711 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
 712 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
 713 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
 714 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
 715 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
 716 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
 717 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
 718 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
 719 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
 720 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
 721
 722 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
 723 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
 724 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
 725 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
 726 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
 727 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
 728 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
 729 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
 730 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
 731 list</a>. :)</p>
 732
 733       </div>
 734       <div class="tags">
 735
 736
 737         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
 738
 739
 740       </div>
 741     </div>
 742     <div class="padding"></div>
 743
 744     <div class="entry">
 745       <div class="title">
 746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
 747       </div>
 748       <div class="date">
 749         16th September 2014
 750       </div>
 751       <div class="body">
 752         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
 753 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
 754 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
 755 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
 756 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
 757 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
 758 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
 759 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
 760 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
 761 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
 762 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
 763 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
 764 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
 765 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
 766
 767 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
 768 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
 769 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
 770 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
 771 depend on the small and clever package
 772 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
 773 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
 774 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
 775 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
 776 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
 777 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
 778 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
 779 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
 780 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
 781 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
 782 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
 783
 784 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
 785 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
 786 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
 787 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
 788 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
 789 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
 790 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
 791 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
 792 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
 793 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
 794 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
 795 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
 796 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
 797 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
 798 dialog.</p>
 799
 800 <p><table>
 801
 802 <tr>
 803 <th>Machine/setup</th>
 804 <th>Original tasksel</th>
 805 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
 806 <th>Reduction</th>
 807 </tr>
 808
 809 <tr>
 810 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
 811 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
 812 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
 813 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
 814 </tr>
 815
 816 <tr>
 817 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
 818 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
 819 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
 820 <td>23 min 40%</td>
 821 </tr>
 822
 823 <tr>
 824 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
 825 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
 826 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
 827 <td>11 min 50%</td>
 828 </tr>
 829
 830 <tr>
 831 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
 832 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
 833 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
 834 <td>2 min 33%</td>
 835 </tr>
 836
 837 <tr>
 838 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
 839 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
 840 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
 841 <td>4 min 21%</td>
 842 </tr>
 843
 844 </table></p>
 845
 846 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
 847 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
 848 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
 849 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
 850 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
 851 installed.</p>
 852
 853 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
 854 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
 855 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
 856 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
 857 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
 858 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
 859 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
 860 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
 861 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
 862 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
 863 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
 864 for the entire installation.</p>
 865
 866 <p>I've implemented this in the
 867 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
 868 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
 869 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
 870 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
 871 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
 872
 873 <p><blockquote><pre>
 874 #!/bin/sh
 875 set -e
 876 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
 877 info() {
 878     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
 879 }
 880 error() {
 881     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
 882 }
 883 override_install() {
 884     apt-install eatmydata || true
 885     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
 886         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
 887             file=/usr/bin/$bin
 888             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
 889             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
 890                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
 891                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
 892                     > /target$file.edu
 893                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
 894                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
 895                     --rename --quiet --add $file
 896                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
 897             else
 898                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
 899             fi
 900         done
 901     else
 902         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
 903     fi
 904 }
 905
 906 override_install
 907 </pre></blockquote></p>
 908
 909 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
 910 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
 911
 912 <p><blockquote><pre>
 913 #! /bin/sh -e
 914 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
 915 error() {
 916     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
 917 }
 918 remove_install_override() {
 919     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
 920         file=/usr/bin/$bin
 921         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
 922             rm /target$file
 923             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
 924                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
 925             rm /target$file.edu
 926         else
 927             error "Missing divert for $file."
 928         fi
 929     done
 930     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
 931 }
 932
 933 remove_install_override
 934 </pre></blockquote></p>
 935
 936 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
 937 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
 938 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
 939
 940 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
 941 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
 942 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
 943 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
 944 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
 945 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
 946 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
 947 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
 948 everyone.</p>
 949
 950 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
 951 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
 952 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
 953 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
 954
 955 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
 956 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
 957 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
 958 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
 959 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
 960
 961 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
 962 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
 963 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
 964 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
 965 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
 966
 967       </div>
 968       <div class="tags">
 969
 970
 971         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 972
 973
 974       </div>
 975     </div>
 976     <div class="padding"></div>
 977
 978     <div class="entry">
 979       <div class="title">
 980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
 981       </div>
 982       <div class="date">
 983         10th September 2014
 984       </div>
 985       <div class="body">
 986         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
 987 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
 988 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
 989 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
 990 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
 991 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
 992 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
 993 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
 994 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
 995 those problems are gone now.</p>
 996
 997 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
 998 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
 999 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
1000 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
1001 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
1002
1003 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
1004 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
1005 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
1006
1007 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
1008 line:</p>
1009
1010 <p><blockquote><pre>
1011 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
1012 </pre></blockquote></p>
1013
1014 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
1015 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
1016 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
1017 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
1018
1019 <p><blockquote><pre>
1020 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
1021 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
1022 %
1023 </pre></blockquote></p>
1024
1025 <p>Now if only
1026 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
1027 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
1028 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
1029 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
1030 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
1031 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
1032 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
1033 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
1034 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
1035
1036       </div>
1037       <div class="tags">
1038
1039
1040         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1041
1042
1043       </div>
1044     </div>
1045     <div class="padding"></div>
1046
1047     <div class="entry">
1048       <div class="title">
1049         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
1050       </div>
1051       <div class="date">
1052         17th June 2014
1053       </div>
1054       <div class="body">
1055         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1056 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
1057 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
1058 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
1059 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
1060
1061 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
1062 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
1063 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
1064 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
1065 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
1066 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
1067 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
1068 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
1069 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
1070 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
1071 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
1072 goals.</p>
1073
1074 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
1075 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
1076 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
1077 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
1078 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
1079 chapters together into one large web page (aka
1080 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
1081 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
1082 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
1083 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
1084 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
1085 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
1086 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
1087 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
1088 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
1089 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
1090 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
1091 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
1092 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
1093 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
1094 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
1095 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
1096 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
1097 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
1098
1099 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
1100 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
1101 track the English original.  For this we use the
1102 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
1103 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
1104 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
1105 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
1106 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
1107 files), which the translations update with the native language
1108 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
1109 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
1110 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
1111 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
1112 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
1113 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
1114 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
1115 of the documentation.</p>
1116
1117 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
1118 recommend using
1119 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
1120 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
1121 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
1122 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
1123 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
1124 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
1125 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
1126 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
1127
1128 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
1129 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
1130 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
1131 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
1132 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
1133 translated images by storing translated versions in
1134 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
1135 package maintainers know more.</p>
1136
1137 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
1138 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
1139 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
1140 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
1141 PDF version</a> or the
1142 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
1143 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
1144 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
1145
1146 <p>To learn more, check out
1147 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
1148 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
1149 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
1150 manual on the wiki</a> and
1151 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
1152 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
1153
1154       </div>
1155       <div class="tags">
1156
1157
1158         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1159
1160
1161       </div>
1162     </div>
1163     <div class="padding"></div>
1164
1165     <div class="entry">
1166       <div class="title">
1167         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
1168       </div>
1169       <div class="date">
1170         23rd April 2014
1171       </div>
1172       <div class="body">
1173         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
1174 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
1175 So I implemented one, using
1176 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
1177 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
1178 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
1179 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
1180 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
1181 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
1182
1183 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
1184 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
1185 packages to install.  The first part is in
1186 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
1187 this:</p>
1188
1189 <p><blockquote><pre>
1190 Task: isenkram
1191 Section: hardware
1192 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1193  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
1194  proposed.
1195 Test-new-install: mark show
1196 Relevance: 8
1197 Packages: for-current-hardware
1198 </pre></blockquote></p>
1199
1200 <p>The second part is in
1201 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
1202 this:</p>
1203
1204 <p><blockquote><pre>
1205 #!/bin/sh
1206 #
1207 (
1208     isenkram-lookup
1209     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1210 ) | sort -u
1211 </pre></blockquote></p>
1212
1213 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
1214 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
1215 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
1216 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
1217 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
1218 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
1219
1220 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
1221 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
1222 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
1223 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
1224 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
1225 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
1226 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
1227 the python-apt code (bug
1228 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
1229 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
1230 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
1231 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
1232 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
1233 unstable today.</p>
1234
1235 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
1236 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
1237 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
1238 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
1239 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
1240 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
1241 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
1242 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
1243 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
1244
1245 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
1246 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
1247 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
1248 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
1249 package.  See also
1250 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
1251 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
1252 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
1253 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
1254
1255       </div>
1256       <div class="tags">
1257
1258
1259         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1260
1261
1262       </div>
1263     </div>
1264     <div class="padding"></div>
1265
1266     <div class="entry">
1267       <div class="title">
1268         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
1269       </div>
1270       <div class="date">
1271         15th April 2014
1272       </div>
1273       <div class="body">
1274         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
1275 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
1276 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
1277 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
1278 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
1279 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
1280
1281 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
1282 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
1283 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
1284 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
1285 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
1286 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
1287 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
1288
1289 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
1290 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
1291 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
1292 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
1293 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
1294 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
1295 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
1296 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
1297 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
1298 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
1299 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
1300 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
1301
1302 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
1303 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
1304 become root:</p>
1305
1306 <p><pre>
1307 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
1308   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
1309   u-boot-tools
1310 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
1311   freedom-maker
1312 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
1313 </pre></p>
1314
1315 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
1316 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
1317 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
1318 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
1319 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
1320 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
1321 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
1322 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
1323
1324 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
1325 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
1326 the preseed values:</p>
1327
1328 <p><pre>
1329 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
1330 </pre></p>
1331
1332 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
1333 it still work.</p>
1334
1335 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
1336 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
1337 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
1338 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
1339 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
1340 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
1341 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
1342
1343 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
1344 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
1345 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
1346 irc.debian.org)</a> and
1347 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
1348 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
1349
1350       </div>
1351       <div class="tags">
1352
1353
1354         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1355
1356
1357       </div>
1358     </div>
1359     <div class="padding"></div>
1360
1361     <div class="entry">
1362       <div class="title">
1363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
1364       </div>
1365       <div class="date">
1366          9th April 2014
1367       </div>
1368       <div class="body">
1369         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
1370 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
1371 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
1372 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
1373 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
1374 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
1375 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
1376 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
1377 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
1378 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
1379 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
1380 have looked at a system called
1381 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
1382 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
1383
1384 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
1385 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
1386 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
1387 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
1388 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
1389 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
1390 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
1391 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
1392 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
1393 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
1394 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
1395 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
1396 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
1397
1398 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
1399 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
1400 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
1401 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
1402 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
1403 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
1404 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
1405 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
1406 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
1407 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
1408 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
1409 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
1410 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
1411 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
1412 account.</p>
1413
1414 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
1415 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
1416 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
1417 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
1418 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
1419 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
1420 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
1421
1422 <p><blockquote><pre>
1423 [s3c]
1424 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
1425 backend-login: API-login
1426 backend-password: API-password
1427 fs-passphrase: local-password
1428 </pre></blockquote></p>
1429
1430 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
1431 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
1432 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
1433 details and password to create it:</p>
1434
1435 <p><blockquote><pre>
1436 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
1437 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
1438   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
1439 Enter backend login:
1440 Enter backend password:
1441 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
1442 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
1443 Enter encryption password:
1444 Confirm encryption password:
1445 Generating random encryption key...
1446 Creating metadata tables...
1447 Dumping metadata...
1448 ..objects..
1449 ..blocks..
1450 ..inodes..
1451 ..inode_blocks..
1452 ..symlink_targets..
1453 ..names..
1454 ..contents..
1455 ..ext_attributes..
1456 Compressing and uploading metadata...
1457 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
1458 # </pre></blockquote></p>
1459
1460 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
1461
1462 <p><blockquote><pre>
1463 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
1464   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
1465 Using 4 upload threads.
1466 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
1467 Reading metadata...
1468 ..objects..
1469 ..blocks..
1470 ..inodes..
1471 ..inode_blocks..
1472 ..symlink_targets..
1473 ..names..
1474 ..contents..
1475 ..ext_attributes..
1476 Mounting filesystem...
1477 # df -h /s3ql
1478 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
1479 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
1480 #
1481 </pre></blockquote></p>
1482
1483 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
1484 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
1485 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
1486 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
1487 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
1488 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
1489
1490 <p><blockquote><pre>
1491 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
1492 #
1493 </pre></blockquote></p>
1494
1495 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
1496 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
1497 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
1498 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
1499 file system:</p>
1500
1501 <p><blockquote><pre>
1502 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
1503 Using cached metadata.
1504 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
1505 Checking DB integrity...
1506 Creating temporary extra indices...
1507 Checking lost+found...
1508 Checking cached objects...
1509 Checking names (refcounts)...
1510 Checking contents (names)...
1511 Checking contents (inodes)...
1512 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
1513 Checking objects (reference counts)...
1514 Checking objects (backend)...
1515 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
1516 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
1517 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
1518 Checking objects (sizes)...
1519 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
1520 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
1521 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
1522 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
1523 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
1524 Checking inodes (sizes)...
1525 Checking extended attributes (names)...
1526 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
1527 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
1528 Checking directory reachability...
1529 Checking unix conventions...
1530 Checking referential integrity...
1531 Dropping temporary indices...
1532 Backing up old metadata...
1533 Dumping metadata...
1534 ..objects..
1535 ..blocks..
1536 ..inodes..
1537 ..inode_blocks..
1538 ..symlink_targets..
1539 ..names..
1540 ..contents..
1541 ..ext_attributes..
1542 Compressing and uploading metadata...
1543 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
1544 #
1545 </pre></blockquote></p>
1546
1547 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
1548 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
1549 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
1550 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
1551 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
1552 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
1553 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
1554 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
1555 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
1556 working set.</p>
1557
1558 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
1559 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
1560 busy:</p>
1561
1562 <p><blockquote><pre>
1563 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
1564   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
1565 Using 8 upload threads.
1566 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
1567 #
1568 </pre></blockquote></p>
1569
1570 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
1571 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
1572 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
1573 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
1574 s3qlctrl:
1575
1576 <p><blockquote><pre>
1577 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
1578 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
1579 #
1580 </pre></blockquote></p>
1581
1582 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
1583 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
1584 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
1585 a report:</p>
1586
1587 <p><blockquote><pre>
1588 # s3qlstat /s3ql
1589 Directory entries:    9141
1590 Inodes:               9143
1591 Data blocks:          8851
1592 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
1593 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
1594 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
1595 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
1596 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
1597 #
1598 </pre></blockquote></p>
1599
1600 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
1601 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
1602 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
1603 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
1604 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
1605 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
1606 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
1607 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
1608 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
1609 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
1610 best.</p>
1611
1612 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
1613 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
1614 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
1615 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
1616 poster is titled
1617 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
1618 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
1619 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
1620 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
1621 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
1622
1623 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
1624 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
1625 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
1626 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
1627 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
1628 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
1629 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
1630 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
1631
1632 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
1633 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
1634 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
1635 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
1636 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
1637 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
1638 only read from it.</p>
1639
1640 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1641 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1642 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1643
1644       </div>
1645       <div class="tags">
1646
1647
1648         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1649
1650
1651       </div>
1652     </div>
1653     <div class="padding"></div>
1654
1655     <div class="entry">
1656       <div class="title">
1657         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
1658       </div>
1659       <div class="date">
1660         14th March 2014
1661       </div>
1662       <div class="body">
1663         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
1664 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
1665 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
1666 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
1667 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
1668 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
1669 release (0.2).</p>
1670
1671 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
1672 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
1673 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
1674 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
1675 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
1676 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
1677 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
1678 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
1679 and build using
1680 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
1681 with a user with sudo access to become root:
1682
1683 <pre>
1684 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
1685   freedom-maker
1686 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
1687   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
1688   u-boot-tools
1689 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
1690 </pre>
1691
1692 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
1693 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
1694 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
1695 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
1696 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
1697 kpartx call.</p>
1698
1699 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
1700 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
1701 the preseed values:</p>
1702
1703 <pre>
1704 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
1705 </pre>
1706
1707 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
1708 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
1709 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
1710 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
1711 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
1712 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
1713
1714 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
1715 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
1716 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
1717 irc.debian.org)</a> and
1718 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
1719 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
1720
1721       </div>
1722       <div class="tags">
1723
1724
1725         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1726
1727
1728       </div>
1729     </div>
1730     <div class="padding"></div>
1731
1732     <div class="entry">
1733       <div class="title">
1734         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
1735       </div>
1736       <div class="date">
1737         22nd February 2014
1738       </div>
1739       <div class="body">
1740         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
1741 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
1742 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
1743 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
1744 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
1745 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
1746 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
1747 proper home since then.</p>
1748
1749 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
1750 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
1751 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
1752 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
1753 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
1754
1755 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
1756 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
1757 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
1758 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
1759 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
1760 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
1761 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
1762 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
1763 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
1764
1765       </div>
1766       <div class="tags">
1767
1768
1769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1770
1771
1772       </div>
1773     </div>
1774     <div class="padding"></div>
1775
1776     <div class="entry">
1777       <div class="title">
1778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
1779       </div>
1780       <div class="date">
1781          3rd February 2014
1782       </div>
1783       <div class="body">
1784         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
1785 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
1786 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
1787 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
1788 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
1789 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
1790 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
1791 <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>,
1792 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
1793
1794 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
1795 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
1796 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
1797 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
1798 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
1799 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
1800
1801 <p><blockquote><pre>
1802 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
1803 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
1804 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
1805 dhclient /dev/eth0
1806 </pre></blockquote></p>
1807
1808 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
1809 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
1810 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
1811
1812 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
1813 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
1814 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
1815 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
1816 side.</p>
1817
1818 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
1819 stuff:</p>
1820
1821 <p><blockquote><pre>
1822 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
1823 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
1824 EOF
1825 apt-get update
1826 apt-get dist-upgrade
1827 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
1828     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
1829 update-alternatives --config runsystem
1830 </pre></blockquote></p>
1831
1832 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
1833 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
1834 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
1835 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
1836 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
1837 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
1838 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
1839 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
1840 ssh instead.
1841
1842 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
1843 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
1844 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
1845 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
1846 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
1847 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
1848
1849 <p><blockquote><pre>
1850 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
1851 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
1852 EOF
1853 </pre></blockquote></p>
1854
1855 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
1856 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
1857 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
1858 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
1859
1860 <p><blockquote><pre>
1861 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
1862 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
1863 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
1864 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
1865 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
1866 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
1867 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
1868 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
1869 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
1870 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
1871 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
1872 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
1873 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
1874 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
1875 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
1876 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
1877 #
1878 </pre></blockquote></p>
1879
1880 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
1881 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
1882 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
1883 command line stuff.<p>
1884
1885       </div>
1886       <div class="tags">
1887
1888
1889         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1890
1891
1892       </div>
1893     </div>
1894     <div class="padding"></div>
1895
1896     <div class="entry">
1897       <div class="title">
1898         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
1899       </div>
1900       <div class="date">
1901         14th January 2014
1902       </div>
1903       <div class="body">
1904         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
1905 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
1906 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
1907 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
1908 the source.  The company behind it provide
1909 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
1910 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
1911 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
1912 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
1913 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
1914 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
1915 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
1916 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
1917 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
1918 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
1919 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
1920 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
1921 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
1922 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
1923 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
1924 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
1925 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
1926 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
1927 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
1928
1929 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
1930
1931 <ul>
1932
1933   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
1934   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
1935   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
1936
1937 </ul>
1938
1939 <p>You can
1940 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
1941 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
1942 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
1943 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
1944 include a test suite check.</p>
1945
1946       </div>
1947       <div class="tags">
1948
1949
1950         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1951
1952
1953       </div>
1954     </div>
1955     <div class="padding"></div>
1956
1957     <div class="entry">
1958       <div class="title">
1959         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
1960       </div>
1961       <div class="date">
1962         24th November 2013
1963       </div>
1964       <div class="body">
1965         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
1966 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
1967 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
1968 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
1969 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
1970 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
1971 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
1972 is working on.  I checked the
1973 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
1974 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
1975 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
1976 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
1977 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
1978 These are the release notes:</p>
1979
1980 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
1981
1982 <ul>
1983
1984   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
1985    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
1986    up.</li>
1987
1988   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
1989
1990   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
1991    Matthias Klose.</li>
1992
1993   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
1994    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
1995
1996   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
1997    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
1998    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
1999
2000 </ul>
2001
2002 <p>You can
2003 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
2004 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
2005 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
2006 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
2007 include a testsuite check.</p>
2008
2009       </div>
2010       <div class="tags">
2011
2012
2013         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2014
2015
2016       </div>
2017     </div>
2018     <div class="padding"></div>
2019
2020     <div class="entry">
2021       <div class="title">
2022         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
2023       </div>
2024       <div class="date">
2025          2nd November 2013
2026       </div>
2027       <div class="body">
2028         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
2029 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
2030 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
2031 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
2032 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
2033
2034 <p><pre>
2035 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
2036 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
2037 # Provides:          rsyslog
2038 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
2039 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
2040 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
2041 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
2042 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
2043 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
2044 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
2045 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
2046 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
2047 ### END INIT INFO
2048 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
2049 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
2050 </pre></p>
2051
2052 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
2053 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
2054 info/comments.</p>
2055
2056 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
2057 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
2058
2059 <p><pre>
2060 #!/bin/sh
2061
2062 # Define LSB log_* functions.
2063 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
2064 # and status_of_proc is working.
2065 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
2066
2067 #
2068 # Function that starts the daemon/service
2069
2070 #
2071 do_start()
2072 {
2073         # Return
2074         #   0 if daemon has been started
2075         #   1 if daemon was already running
2076         #   2 if daemon could not be started
2077         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
2078                 || return 1
2079         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
2080                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
2081                 || return 2
2082         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
2083         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
2084         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
2085 }
2086
2087 #
2088 # Function that stops the daemon/service
2089 #
2090 do_stop()
2091 {
2092         # Return
2093         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
2094         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
2095         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
2096         #   other if a failure occurred
2097         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
2098         RETVAL="$?"
2099         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
2100         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
2101         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
2102         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
2103         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
2104         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
2105         # sleep for some time.
2106         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
2107         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
2108         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
2109         rm -f $PIDFILE
2110         return "$RETVAL"
2111 }
2112
2113 #
2114 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
2115 #
2116 do_reload() {
2117         #
2118         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
2119         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
2120         # then implement that here.
2121         #
2122         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
2123         return 0
2124 }
2125
2126 SCRIPTNAME=$1
2127 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
2128 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
2129 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
2130     script="$1"
2131     shift
2132     . $script
2133 else
2134     exit 0
2135 fi
2136
2137 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
2138 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
2139
2140 # Exit if the package is not installed
2141 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
2142
2143 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
2144 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
2145
2146 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
2147 . /lib/init/vars.sh
2148
2149 case "$1" in
2150   start)
2151         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
2152         do_start
2153         case "$?" in
2154                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
2155                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
2156         esac
2157         ;;
2158   stop)
2159         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
2160         do_stop
2161         case "$?" in
2162                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
2163                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
2164         esac
2165         ;;
2166   status)
2167         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
2168         ;;
2169   #reload|force-reload)
2170         #
2171         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
2172         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
2173         #
2174         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
2175         #do_reload
2176         #log_end_msg $?
2177         #;;
2178   restart|force-reload)
2179         #
2180         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
2181         # 'force-reload' alias
2182         #
2183         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
2184         do_stop
2185         case "$?" in
2186           0|1)
2187                 do_start
2188                 case "$?" in
2189                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
2190                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
2191                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
2192                 esac
2193                 ;;
2194           *)
2195                 # Failed to stop
2196                 log_end_msg 1
2197                 ;;
2198         esac
2199         ;;
2200   *)
2201         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
2202         exit 3
2203         ;;
2204 esac
2205
2206 :
2207 </pre></p>
2208
2209 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
2210 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
2211 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
2212 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
2213
2214 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
2215 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
2216 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
2217 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
2218 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
2219
2220       </div>
2221       <div class="tags">
2222
2223
2224         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2225
2226
2227       </div>
2228     </div>
2229     <div class="padding"></div>
2230
2231     <div class="entry">
2232       <div class="title">
2233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
2234       </div>
2235       <div class="date">
2236          1st November 2013
2237       </div>
2238       <div class="body">
2239         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
2240 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
2241 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
2242 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
2243 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
2244 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
2245 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
2246 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
2247 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
2248 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
2249 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
2250 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
2251
2252 <p>The source is now available from
2253 <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>
2254
2255       </div>
2256       <div class="tags">
2257
2258
2259         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2260
2261
2262       </div>
2263     </div>
2264     <div class="padding"></div>
2265
2266     <div class="entry">
2267       <div class="title">
2268         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
2269       </div>
2270       <div class="date">
2271         27th October 2013
2272       </div>
2273       <div class="body">
2274         <p>The
2275 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
2276 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
2277 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
2278 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
2279 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
2280 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
2281 of a plan to simplify the build system for
2282 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
2283 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
2284 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
2285 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
2286 Raspberry Pi.</p>
2287
2288 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
2289 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
2290 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
2291 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
2292 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
2293 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
2294 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
2295 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
2296 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
2297 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
2298 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
2299 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
2300 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
2301 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
2302 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
2303 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
2304 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
2305 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
2306 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
2307 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
2308 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
2309 available from
2310 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
2311 upstream project page</a>.</p>
2312
2313 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
2314 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
2315 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
2316 list:</p>
2317
2318 <p><pre>
2319 #!/bin/sh
2320 set -e # Exit on first error
2321 rootdir="$1"
2322 cd "$rootdir"
2323 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
2324 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
2325 EOF
2326 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
2327 # install a kernel somewhere too.
2328 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
2329     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
2330 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
2331 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
2332 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
2333 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
2334 </pre></p>
2335
2336 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
2337 to build the image:</p>
2338
2339 <pre>
2340 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
2341     --variant minbase \
2342     --arch armel \
2343     --distribution jessie \
2344     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
2345     --image test.img \
2346     --size 600M \
2347     --bootsize 64M \
2348     --boottype vfat \
2349     --log-level debug \
2350     --verbose \
2351     --no-kernel \
2352     --no-extlinux \
2353     --root-password raspberry \
2354     --hostname raspberrypi \
2355     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
2356     --customize `pwd`/customize \
2357     --package netbase \
2358     --package git-core \
2359     --package binutils \
2360     --package ca-certificates \
2361     --package wget \
2362     --package kmod
2363 </pre></p>
2364
2365 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
2366 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
2367 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
2368 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
2369 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
2370 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
2371 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
2372
2373 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
2374 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
2375 build dependency list.</p>
2376
2377 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
2378 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
2379 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
2380 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
2381
2382       </div>
2383       <div class="tags">
2384
2385
2386         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
2387
2388
2389       </div>
2390     </div>
2391     <div class="padding"></div>
2392
2393     <div class="entry">
2394       <div class="title">
2395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
2396       </div>
2397       <div class="date">
2398         15th October 2013
2399       </div>
2400       <div class="body">
2401         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
2402 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
2403 these. :)</p>
2404
2405 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
2406 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
2407 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
2408 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
2409 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
2410 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
2411 hope you will to. :)</p>
2412
2413 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
2414 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
2415 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
2416 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
2417 donated.  Are you next?</p>
2418
2419 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
2420 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
2421 statement under the heading
2422 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
2423 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
2424 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
2425 too.</p>
2426
2427       </div>
2428       <div class="tags">
2429
2430
2431         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2432
2433
2434       </div>
2435     </div>
2436     <div class="padding"></div>
2437
2438     <div class="entry">
2439       <div class="title">
2440         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
2441       </div>
2442       <div class="date">
2443         27th September 2013
2444       </div>
2445       <div class="body">
2446         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
2447 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
2448 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
2449 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
2450
2451 <ul>
2452
2453 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
2454 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
2455
2456 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
2457 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
2458
2459 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
2460 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
2461 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
2462 (Youtube)</li>
2463
2464 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
2465 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
2466
2467 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
2468 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
2469
2470 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
2471 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
2472 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
2473
2474 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
2475 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
2476 (Youtube)</li>
2477
2478 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
2479 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
2480
2481 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
2482 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
2483
2484 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
2485 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
2486 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
2487
2488 </ul>
2489
2490 <p>A larger list is available from
2491 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
2492 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
2493
2494 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
2495 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
2496 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
2497 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
2498 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
2499 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
2500 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
2501 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
2502 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
2503 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2504 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2505
2506       </div>
2507       <div class="tags">
2508
2509
2510         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2511
2512
2513       </div>
2514     </div>
2515     <div class="padding"></div>
2516
2517     <div class="entry">
2518       <div class="title">
2519         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
2520       </div>
2521       <div class="date">
2522         10th September 2013
2523       </div>
2524       <div class="body">
2525         <p>I was introduced to the
2526 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
2527 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
2528 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
2529 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
2530 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
2531 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
2532 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
2533 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
2534
2535 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
2536 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
2537 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
2538 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
2539 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
2540
2541 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
2542 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
2543 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
2544 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
2545 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
2546 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
2547 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
2548 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
2549 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
2550 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
2551 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
2552 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
2553 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
2554 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
2555 missing in Debian).</p>
2556
2557 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
2558 scripts
2559 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
2560 and a administrative web interface
2561 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
2562 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
2563 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
2564 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
2565 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
2566 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
2567 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
2568 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
2569 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
2570 this is really working yet, see
2571 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
2572 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
2573 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
2574 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
2575 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
2576 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
2577 with lots of half baked features.</p>
2578
2579 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
2580 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
2581 at.</p>
2582
2583 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
2584
2585 <ol>
2586
2587 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
2588 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
2589 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
2590 to the Debian installer:<p>
2591 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
2592
2593 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
2594 install on.</li>
2595
2596 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
2597 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
2598
2599 </ol>
2600
2601 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
2602
2603 <ol>
2604
2605 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
2606 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
2607 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
2608 <pre>
2609 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
2610 </pre></li>
2611 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
2612 <pre>
2613 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
2614    apt-key add -
2615 apt-get update
2616 apt-get install freedombox-setup
2617 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
2618 </pre></li>
2619 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
2620
2621 </ol>
2622
2623 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
2624 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
2625 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
2626 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
2627 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
2628
2629 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
2630 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
2631 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
2632 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
2633
2634 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
2635 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
2636 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
2637 irc.debian.org and the
2638 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
2639 mailing list</a>.</p>
2640
2641 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
2642 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
2643 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
2644 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
2645 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
2646 default password is 'secret'.</p>
2647
2648       </div>
2649       <div class="tags">
2650
2651
2652         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2653
2654
2655       </div>
2656     </div>
2657     <div class="padding"></div>
2658
2659     <div class="entry">
2660       <div class="title">
2661         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
2662       </div>
2663       <div class="date">
2664         18th August 2013
2665       </div>
2666       <div class="body">
2667         <p>Earlier, I reported about
2668 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
2669 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
2670 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
2671 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
2672 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
2673 currently on the disk.</p>
2674
2675 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
2676 <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>
2677 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
2678 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
2679 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
2680 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
2681 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
2682 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
2683 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
2684 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
2685 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
2686 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
2687 the broken disks.</p>
2688
2689       </div>
2690       <div class="tags">
2691
2692
2693         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2694
2695
2696       </div>
2697     </div>
2698     <div class="padding"></div>
2699
2700     <div class="entry">
2701       <div class="title">
2702         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
2703       </div>
2704       <div class="date">
2705         17th July 2013
2706       </div>
2707       <div class="body">
2708         <p>Today I switched to
2709 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
2710 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
2711 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
2712 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
2713 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
2714 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
2715 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
2716 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
2717 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
2718 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
2719 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
2720 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
2721 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
2722 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
2723 station from now on.</p>
2724
2725 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
2726 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
2727 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
2728 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
2729 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
2730 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
2731 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
2732 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
2733 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
2734 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
2735 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
2736 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
2737
2738 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
2739 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
2740 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
2741 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
2742 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
2743 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
2744 parameters are tuned:</p>
2745
2746 <ul>
2747
2748 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
2749     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
2750
2751 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
2752     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
2753     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
2754
2755 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
2756     systems.</li>
2757
2758 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
2759     /etc/fstab.</li>
2760
2761 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
2762
2763 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
2764     cron.daily).</li>
2765
2766 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
2767     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
2768
2769 </ul>
2770
2771 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
2772 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
2773 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
2774 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
2775 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
2776 from getting the data on the disk (see
2777 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
2778 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
2779 right thing to do.</p>
2780
2781 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
2782 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
2783 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
2784
2785 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
2786 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
2787 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
2788 instead of during my work.</p>
2789
2790 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
2791 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
2792
2793 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
2794 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
2795 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
2796
2797 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
2798 there.</p>
2799
2800 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
2801 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
2802 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
2803 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
2804 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
2805 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
2806 back.</p>
2807
2808       </div>
2809       <div class="tags">
2810
2811
2812         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2813
2814
2815       </div>
2816     </div>
2817     <div class="padding"></div>
2818
2819     <div class="entry">
2820       <div class="title">
2821         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
2822       </div>
2823       <div class="date">
2824         10th July 2013
2825       </div>
2826       <div class="body">
2827         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
2828 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
2829 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
2830 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
2831 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
2832 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
2833 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
2834 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
2835
2836 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
2837 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
2838 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
2839 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
2840 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
2841 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
2842 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
2843 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
2844 lock up when I download a new
2845 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
2846 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
2847 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
2848
2849 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
2850 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
2851 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
2852 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
2853 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
2854 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
2855
2856 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
2857 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
2858 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
2859 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
2860 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
2861 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
2862
2863 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
2864 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
2865 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
2866 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
2867 exist).</p>
2868
2869       </div>
2870       <div class="tags">
2871
2872
2873         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2874
2875
2876       </div>
2877     </div>
2878     <div class="padding"></div>
2879
2880     <div class="entry">
2881       <div class="title">
2882         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
2883       </div>
2884       <div class="date">
2885          9th July 2013
2886       </div>
2887       <div class="body">
2888         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
2889 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
2890 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
2891 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
2892 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2893 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
2894 Bitraf</a>.</p>
2895
2896 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
2897 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
2898 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
2899 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
2900 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
2901
2902       </div>
2903       <div class="tags">
2904
2905
2906         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2907
2908
2909       </div>
2910     </div>
2911     <div class="padding"></div>
2912
2913     <div class="entry">
2914       <div class="title">
2915         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
2916       </div>
2917       <div class="date">
2918          5th July 2013
2919       </div>
2920       <div class="body">
2921         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
2922 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
2923 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
2924 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
2925 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
2926 ended up picking a
2927 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
2928 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
2929 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
2930 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
2931 on that below.</p>
2932
2933 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
2934 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
2935 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
2936 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
2937 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
2938 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
2939 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
2940 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
2941 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
2942
2943 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
2944 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
2945 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
2946 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
2947 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
2948 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
2949 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
2950
2951 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
2952 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
2953
2954 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
2955 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
2956 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
2957 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
2958 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
2959 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
2960 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
2961 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
2962 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
2963 kernel developers as
2964 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
2965 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
2966 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
2967 Lenovo forums, both for
2968 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
2969 2012-11-10</a> and for
2970 <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
2971 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
2972 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
2973 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
2974 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
2975 There is even a
2976 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
2977 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
2978 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
2979
2980 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
2981 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
2982 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
2983 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
2984 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
2985 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
2986 fixed. :)</p>
2987
2988       </div>
2989       <div class="tags">
2990
2991
2992         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2993
2994
2995       </div>
2996     </div>
2997     <div class="padding"></div>
2998
2999     <div class="entry">
3000       <div class="title">
3001         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
3002       </div>
3003       <div class="date">
3004          4th July 2013
3005       </div>
3006       <div class="body">
3007         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
3008 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
3009 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
3010 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
3011 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
3012 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
3013 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
3014 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
3015 with an expencive door stop.</p>
3016
3017 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
3018 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
3019 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
3020 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
3021 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
3022 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
3023 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
3024
3025 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
3026 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
3027 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
3028 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
3029 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
3030 new laptop now. :)</p>
3031
3032 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
3033
3034       </div>
3035       <div class="tags">
3036
3037
3038         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3039
3040
3041       </div>
3042     </div>
3043     <div class="padding"></div>
3044
3045     <div class="entry">
3046       <div class="title">
3047         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
3048       </div>
3049       <div class="date">
3050         25th June 2013
3051       </div>
3052       <div class="body">
3053         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
3054 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
3055 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
3056 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
3057 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
3058 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
3059 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
3060 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
3061 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
3062 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
3063 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
3064
3065 <p><pre>
3066 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
3067 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
3068 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
3069 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
3070 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
3071 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
3072 firmware-ipw2x00
3073 firmware-ipw2x00
3074 Preconfiguring packages ...
3075 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
3076 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
3077 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
3078 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
3079 #
3080 </pre></p>
3081
3082 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
3083 printed instead:</p>
3084
3085 <p><pre>
3086 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
3087 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
3088 #
3089 </pre></p>
3090
3091 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
3092 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
3093
3094 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
3095 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
3096 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
3097 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
3098 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
3099 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
3100 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
3101 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
3102 machine.</p>
3103
3104 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
3105 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
3106 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
3107 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
3108 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
3109 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
3110
3111       </div>
3112       <div class="tags">
3113
3114
3115         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3116
3117
3118       </div>
3119     </div>
3120     <div class="padding"></div>
3121
3122     <div class="entry">
3123       <div class="title">
3124         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
3125       </div>
3126       <div class="date">
3127         11th June 2013
3128       </div>
3129       <div class="body">
3130         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
3131 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
3132 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
3133 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
3134 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
3135 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
3136 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
3137 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
3138 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
3139 i915 driver used by the
3140 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
3141 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
3142
3143 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
3144 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
3145 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
3146 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
3147 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
3148
3149 <pre>
3150 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
3151 update-initramfs -u -k all
3152 </pre>
3153
3154 <p>Since March 2012 there is
3155 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
3156 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
3157 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
3158 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
3159 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
3160 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
3161 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
3162 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
3163 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
3164 number.</p>
3165
3166 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
3167 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
3168
3169 <p><pre>
3170 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
3171     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
3172     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
3173  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
3174  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
3175     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
3176  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
3177     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
3178  Latency: 0
3179  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
3180  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
3181  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
3182  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
3183  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
3184  Capabilities: <access denied>
3185  Kernel driver in use: i915
3186 </pre></p>
3187
3188 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
3189
3190 <p><pre>
3191 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
3192        ...
3193         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
3194         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
3195        ...
3196 }
3197 </pre></p>
3198
3199 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
3200 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
3201 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
3202 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
3203 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
3204 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
3205 yet shown up in
3206 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
3207 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
3208 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
3209 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
3210 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
3211 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
3212
3213 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
3214 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
3215 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
3216 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
3217 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
3218 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
3219 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
3220 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
3221 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
3222 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
3223 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
3224 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
3225
3226 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
3227 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
3228 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
3229 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
3230 backlight.</p>
3231
3232       </div>
3233       <div class="tags">
3234
3235
3236         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3237
3238
3239       </div>
3240     </div>
3241     <div class="padding"></div>
3242
3243     <div class="entry">
3244       <div class="title">
3245         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
3246       </div>
3247       <div class="date">
3248         27th May 2013
3249       </div>
3250       <div class="body">
3251         <p>Two days ago, I asked
3252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
3253 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
3254 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
3255 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
3256 and Windows 8.</p>
3257
3258 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
3259 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
3260 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
3261 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
3262 enough to tell.</p>
3263
3264 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
3265 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
3266 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
3267 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
3268 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
3269 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
3270 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
3271 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
3272 to follow.</p>
3273
3274 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
3275 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
3276 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
3277 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
3278 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
3279 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
3280 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
3281 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
3282
3283 <p>I've updated the
3284 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
3285 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
3286 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
3287 machine.</p>
3288
3289 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
3290 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
3291
3292       </div>
3293       <div class="tags">
3294
3295
3296         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3297
3298
3299       </div>
3300     </div>
3301     <div class="padding"></div>
3302
3303     <div class="entry">
3304       <div class="title">
3305         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
3306       </div>
3307       <div class="date">
3308         25th May 2013
3309       </div>
3310       <div class="body">
3311         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
3312 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
3313 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
3314 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
3315 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
3316 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
3317
3318 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
3319 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
3320 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
3321 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
3322 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
3323 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
3324 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
3325 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
3326 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
3327 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
3328
3329 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
3330 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
3331 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
3332 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
3333 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
3334 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
3335
3336 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
3337 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
3338 on new Laptops?</p>
3339
3340       </div>
3341       <div class="tags">
3342
3343
3344         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3345
3346
3347       </div>
3348     </div>
3349     <div class="padding"></div>
3350
3351     <div class="entry">
3352       <div class="title">
3353         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
3354       </div>
3355       <div class="date">
3356         17th May 2013
3357       </div>
3358       <div class="body">
3359         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
3360 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
3361 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
3362 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
3363 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
3364 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
3365 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
3366 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
3367 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
3368 donate some money</a>.
3369
3370 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
3371 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
3372 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
3373 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
3374 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
3375
3376 <p>The script,
3377 <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/>
3378 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
3379 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
3380 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
3381
3382 <ol>
3383
3384 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
3385 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
3386 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
3387     our configuration.</li>
3388 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
3389     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
3390     according to the profile specified in the config above,
3391     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
3392 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
3393     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
3394 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
3395
3396 </ol>
3397
3398 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
3399 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
3400 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
3401 the needed packages.</p>
3402
3403 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
3404 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
3405 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
3406 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
3407 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
3408 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
3409
3410 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
3411 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
3412 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
3413
3414 <p><pre>
3415 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
3416 DESKTOP="lxde"
3417 </pre></p>
3418
3419 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
3420 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
3421 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
3422 boot.</p>
3423
3424       </div>
3425       <div class="tags">
3426
3427
3428         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3429
3430
3431       </div>
3432     </div>
3433     <div class="padding"></div>
3434
3435     <div class="entry">
3436       <div class="title">
3437         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
3438       </div>
3439       <div class="date">
3440         11th May 2013
3441       </div>
3442       <div class="body">
3443         <P>In January,
3444 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
3445 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
3446 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
3447 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
3448 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
3449 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
3450 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
3451 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
3452 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
3453 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
3454 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
3455 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
3456
3457 <p><table>
3458 <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>
3459 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
3460 <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>
3461 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
3462 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
3463 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
3464 <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>
3465 <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>
3466 <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>
3467 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
3468 </table></p>
3469
3470 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
3471 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
3472 available in experimental.</p>
3473
3474 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
3475 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
3476 for LEGO designers.</p>
3477
3478       </div>
3479       <div class="tags">
3480
3481
3482         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
3483
3484
3485       </div>
3486     </div>
3487     <div class="padding"></div>
3488
3489     <div class="entry">
3490       <div class="title">
3491         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
3492       </div>
3493       <div class="date">
3494          5th May 2013
3495       </div>
3496       <div class="body">
3497         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
3498 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
3499 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
3500 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
3501 soon.</p>
3502
3503 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
3504 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
3505 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
3506 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
3507 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
3508 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
3509 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
3510 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
3511 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
3512 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
3513 Edu.</a>
3514
3515 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
3516 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
3517 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
3518 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
3519 follow.<p>
3520
3521       </div>
3522       <div class="tags">
3523
3524
3525         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3526
3527
3528       </div>
3529     </div>
3530     <div class="padding"></div>
3531
3532     <div class="entry">
3533       <div class="title">
3534         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
3535       </div>
3536       <div class="date">
3537          3rd April 2013
3538       </div>
3539       <div class="body">
3540         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
3541 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
3542 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
3543 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
3544
3545 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
3546 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
3547 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
3548 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
3549 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
3550 BTS. :)</p>
3551
3552       </div>
3553       <div class="tags">
3554
3555
3556         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3557
3558
3559       </div>
3560     </div>
3561     <div class="padding"></div>
3562
3563     <div class="entry">
3564       <div class="title">
3565         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
3566       </div>
3567       <div class="date">
3568          2nd February 2013
3569       </div>
3570       <div class="body">
3571         <p>My
3572 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
3573 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
3574 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
3575 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
3576 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
3577 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
3578 version too.</p>
3579
3580 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
3581 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
3582 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
3583 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
3584 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
3585 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
3586 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
3587 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
3588
3589 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
3590 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
3591 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
3592 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
3593 it. :)</p>
3594
3595 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3596 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3597 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3598
3599       </div>
3600       <div class="tags">
3601
3602
3603         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3604
3605
3606       </div>
3607     </div>
3608     <div class="padding"></div>
3609
3610     <div class="entry">
3611       <div class="title">
3612         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
3613       </div>
3614       <div class="date">
3615         22nd January 2013
3616       </div>
3617       <div class="body">
3618         <p>Yesterday, I
3619 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
3620 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
3621 pluggable hardware devices, which I
3622 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
3623 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
3624 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
3625 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
3626 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
3627 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
3628 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
3629 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
3630 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
3631 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
3632
3633 <pre>
3634 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
3635 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
3636 </pre>
3637
3638 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
3639 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
3640 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
3641 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
3642
3643 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
3644 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
3645 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
3646 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
3647 word.</p>
3648
3649 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
3650 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
3651 process.</p>
3652
3653 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
3654 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
3655
3656       </div>
3657       <div class="tags">
3658
3659
3660         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3661
3662
3663       </div>
3664     </div>
3665     <div class="padding"></div>
3666
3667     <div class="entry">
3668       <div class="title">
3669         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
3670       </div>
3671       <div class="date">
3672         21st January 2013
3673       </div>
3674       <div class="body">
3675         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
3676 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
3677 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
3678 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
3679 it, fetch the
3680 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
3681 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
3682 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
3683 autostart script.</p>
3684
3685 <p>The design is simple:</p>
3686
3687 <ul>
3688
3689 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
3690 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
3691
3692 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
3693 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
3694 initially did.</li>
3695
3696 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
3697 the APT database, a database
3698 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
3699 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
3700
3701 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
3702 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
3703 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
3704 package or packages.</li>
3705
3706 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
3707 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
3708
3709 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
3710 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
3711
3712 </ul>
3713
3714 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
3715 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
3716 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
3717 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
3718
3719 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
3720 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
3721 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
3722 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
3723 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
3724
3725 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
3726 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
3727 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
3728 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
3729 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
3730 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
3731 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
3732 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
3733
3734 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
3735 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
3736 '<tt>svn checkout
3737 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
3738 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
3739 devscripts package.</p>
3740
3741 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
3742 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
3743 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
3744 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
3745 instructions</a> for details.</p>
3746
3747       </div>
3748       <div class="tags">
3749
3750
3751         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3752
3753
3754       </div>
3755     </div>
3756     <div class="padding"></div>
3757
3758     <div class="entry">
3759       <div class="title">
3760         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
3761       </div>
3762       <div class="date">
3763         19th January 2013
3764       </div>
3765       <div class="body">
3766         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
3767 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
3768 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
3769 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
3770 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
3771 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
3772 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
3773 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
3774 not a durable solution.
3775
3776 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
3777 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
3778
3779 <ul>
3780
3781 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
3782   than A4).</li>
3783 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
3784 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
3785 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
3786 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
3787 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
3788 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
3789 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
3790 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
3791 size).</li>
3792 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
3793   X.org packages.</li>
3794 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
3795   the time).
3796
3797 </ul>
3798
3799 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
3800 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
3801 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
3802 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
3803 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
3804 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
3805 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
3806 still be useful.</p>
3807
3808 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
3809 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
3810 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
3811 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
3812 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
3813 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
3814
3815       </div>
3816       <div class="tags">
3817
3818
3819         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3820
3821
3822       </div>
3823     </div>
3824     <div class="padding"></div>
3825
3826     <div class="entry">
3827       <div class="title">
3828         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
3829       </div>
3830       <div class="date">
3831         18th January 2013
3832       </div>
3833       <div class="body">
3834         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
3835 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
3836 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
3837 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
3838 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
3839 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
3840 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
3841
3842 <pre>
3843 #!/usr/bin/python
3844 import sys
3845 import apt
3846 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
3847     cache = apt.Cache()
3848     cache.open(None)
3849     thepkgs = []
3850     for pkg in cache:
3851         version = pkg.candidate
3852         if version is None:
3853             version = pkg.installed
3854         if version is None:
3855             continue
3856         record = version.record
3857         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
3858             continue
3859         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
3860         for t in mime_types:
3861             t = t.rstrip().strip()
3862             if t == mimetype:
3863                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
3864     return thepkgs
3865 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
3866 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
3867     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
3868 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
3869 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
3870     print "  %s" %pkg
3871 </pre>
3872
3873 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
3874
3875 <pre>
3876 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
3877 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
3878   gecko-mediaplayer
3879 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
3880 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
3881   browser-plugin-gnash
3882 %
3883 </pre>
3884
3885 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
3886 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
3887 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
3888 anyone working on adding it?</p>
3889
3890 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
3891 request for icweasel support for this feature is
3892 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
3893 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
3894 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
3895 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
3896
3897       </div>
3898       <div class="tags">
3899
3900
3901         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3902
3903
3904       </div>
3905     </div>
3906     <div class="padding"></div>
3907
3908     <div class="entry">
3909       <div class="title">
3910         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
3911       </div>
3912       <div class="date">
3913         16th January 2013
3914       </div>
3915       <div class="body">
3916         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
3917 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
3918 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
3919 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
3920 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
3921 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
3922 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
3923 downloaded by the browser.</p>
3924
3925 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
3926 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
3927 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
3928 can be found on the
3929 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
3930 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
3931 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
3932 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
3933 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
3934
3935 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
3936
3937 <pre>
3938   count MIME type
3939   ----- -----------------------
3940      32 text/plain
3941      30 audio/mpeg
3942      29 image/png
3943      28 image/jpeg
3944      27 application/ogg
3945      26 audio/x-mp3
3946      25 image/tiff
3947      25 image/gif
3948      22 image/bmp
3949      22 audio/x-wav
3950      20 audio/x-flac
3951      19 audio/x-mpegurl
3952      18 video/x-ms-asf
3953      18 audio/x-musepack
3954      18 audio/x-mpeg
3955      18 application/x-ogg
3956      17 video/mpeg
3957      17 audio/x-scpls
3958      17 audio/ogg
3959      16 video/x-ms-wmv
3960 </pre>
3961
3962 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
3963
3964 <pre>
3965   count MIME type
3966   ----- -----------------------
3967      33 text/plain
3968      32 image/png
3969      32 image/jpeg
3970      29 audio/mpeg
3971      27 image/gif
3972      26 image/tiff
3973      26 application/ogg
3974      25 audio/x-mp3
3975      22 image/bmp
3976      21 audio/x-wav
3977      19 audio/x-mpegurl
3978      19 audio/x-mpeg
3979      18 video/mpeg
3980      18 audio/x-scpls
3981      18 audio/x-flac
3982      18 application/x-ogg
3983      17 video/x-ms-asf
3984      17 text/html
3985      17 audio/x-musepack
3986      16 image/x-xbitmap
3987 </pre>
3988
3989 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
3990
3991 <pre>
3992   count MIME type
3993   ----- -----------------------
3994      31 text/plain
3995      31 image/png
3996      31 image/jpeg
3997      29 audio/mpeg
3998      28 application/ogg
3999      27 image/gif
4000      26 image/tiff
4001      26 audio/x-mp3
4002      23 audio/x-wav
4003      22 image/bmp
4004      21 audio/x-flac
4005      20 audio/x-mpegurl
4006      19 audio/x-mpeg
4007      18 video/x-ms-asf
4008      18 video/mpeg
4009      18 audio/x-scpls
4010      18 application/x-ogg
4011      17 audio/x-musepack
4012      16 video/x-ms-wmv
4013      16 video/x-msvideo
4014 </pre>
4015
4016 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
4017 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
4018 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
4019 issues.</p>
4020
4021 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
4022 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
4023
4024       </div>
4025       <div class="tags">
4026
4027
4028         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4029
4030
4031       </div>
4032     </div>
4033     <div class="padding"></div>
4034
4035     <div class="entry">
4036       <div class="title">
4037         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
4038       </div>
4039       <div class="date">
4040         15th January 2013
4041       </div>
4042       <div class="body">
4043         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
4044 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
4045 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
4046 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
4047 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
4048 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
4049 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
4050 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
4051 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
4052 packages.</p>
4053
4054 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
4055 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
4056 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
4057 modalias.</p>
4058
4059 <p><blockquote>
4060 Package: package-name
4061 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
4062 </blockquote></p>
4063
4064 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
4065 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
4066
4067 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
4068 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
4069
4070 <p><blockquote>
4071 Package: cheese
4072 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
4073 </blockquote></p>
4074
4075 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
4076 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
4077
4078 <p><blockquote>
4079 Package: pcmciautils
4080 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
4081 </blockquote></p>
4082
4083 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
4084 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
4085
4086 <p><blockquote>
4087 Package: colorhug-client
4088 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
4089 </blockquote></p>
4090
4091 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
4092 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
4093 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
4094
4095 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
4096 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
4097 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
4098 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
4099 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
4100 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
4101 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
4102 Raring.</p>
4103
4104 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
4105 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
4106 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
4107 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
4108 try the
4109 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
4110 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
4111 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
4112 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
4113
4114 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
4115 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
4116
4117 <p><blockquote>
4118 % ./hw-support-lookup
4119 <br>yubikey-personalization
4120 <br>%
4121 </blockquote></p>
4122
4123 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
4124 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
4125
4126 <p><blockquote>
4127 % ./hw-support-lookup
4128 <br>pcmciautils
4129 <br>%
4130 </blockquote></p>
4131
4132 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
4133 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
4134 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
4135
4136 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
4137 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
4138 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
4139 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
4140 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
4141 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
4142 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
4143 see if it work.</p>
4144
4145 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
4146 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
4147 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
4148 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
4149
4150       </div>
4151       <div class="tags">
4152
4153
4154         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4155
4156
4157       </div>
4158     </div>
4159     <div class="padding"></div>
4160
4161     <div class="entry">
4162       <div class="title">
4163         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
4164       </div>
4165       <div class="date">
4166         14th January 2013
4167       </div>
4168       <div class="body">
4169         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
4170 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
4171 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
4172 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
4173 in
4174 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
4175 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
4176
4177 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
4178
4179 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
4180 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
4181 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
4182 &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;,
4183 &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
4184 &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;.
4185
4186 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
4187 this shell script:</p>
4188
4189 <pre>
4190 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
4191 </pre>
4192
4193 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
4194 using modinfo:</p>
4195
4196 <pre>
4197 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
4198 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
4199 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
4200 %
4201 </pre>
4202
4203 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
4204
4205 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
4206 Bridge memory controller:</p>
4207
4208 <p><blockquote>
4209 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
4210 </blockquote></p>
4211
4212 <p>This represent these values:</p>
4213
4214 <pre>
4215  v   00008086  (vendor)
4216  d   00002770  (device)
4217  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
4218  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
4219  bc  06        (bus class)
4220  sc  00        (bus subclass)
4221  i   00        (interface)
4222 </pre>
4223
4224 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
4225 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
4226 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
4227 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
4228
4229 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
4230 means.</p>
4231
4232 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
4233
4234 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
4235 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
4236
4237 <p><blockquote>
4238 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
4239 </blockquote></p>
4240
4241 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
4242
4243 <pre>
4244  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
4245  p    0001  (device product)
4246  d    0206  (bcddevice)
4247  dc     09  (device class)
4248  dsc    00  (device subclass)
4249  dp     00  (device protocol)
4250  ic     09  (interface class)
4251  isc    00  (interface subclass)
4252  ip     00  (interface protocol)
4253 </pre>
4254
4255 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
4256 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
4257 these alias entries show up:</p>
4258
4259 <p><blockquote>
4260 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
4261 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
4262 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
4263 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
4264 </blockquote></p>
4265
4266 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
4267 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
4268 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
4269
4270 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
4271
4272 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
4273 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
4274
4275 <p><blockquote>
4276 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
4277 </blockquote></p>
4278
4279 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
4280
4281 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
4282
4283 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
4284 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
4285 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
4286
4287 <p><blockquote>
4288 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
4289 </blockquote></p>
4290
4291 <p>The values present are</p>
4292
4293 <pre>
4294  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
4295  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
4296  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
4297  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
4298  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
4299  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
4300  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
4301  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
4302  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
4303  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
4304  ct   10             (chassis type)
4305  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
4306 </pre>
4307
4308 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
4309 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
4310
4311 <pre>
4312   3 Desktop
4313   4 Low Profile Desktop
4314   5 Pizza Box
4315   6 Mini Tower
4316   7 Tower
4317   8 Portable
4318   9 Laptop
4319  10 Notebook
4320  11 Hand Held
4321  12 Docking Station
4322  13 All In One
4323  14 Sub Notebook
4324  15 Space-saving
4325  16 Lunch Box
4326  17 Main Server Chassis
4327  18 Expansion Chassis
4328  19 Sub Chassis
4329  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
4330  21 Peripheral Chassis
4331  22 RAID Chassis
4332  23 Rack Mount Chassis
4333  24 Sealed-case PC
4334  25 Multi-system
4335  26 CompactPCI
4336  27 AdvancedTCA
4337  28 Blade
4338  29 Blade Enclosing
4339 </pre>
4340
4341 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
4342 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
4343 claim it is a desktop.</p>
4344
4345 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
4346
4347 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
4348 test machine:</p>
4349
4350 <p><blockquote>
4351 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
4352 </blockquote></p>
4353
4354 <p>The values present are</p>
4355
4356 <pre>
4357   ty  01  (type)
4358   pr  00  (prototype)
4359   id  00  (id)
4360   ex  00  (extra)
4361 </pre>
4362
4363 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
4364 the valid values are.</p>
4365
4366 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
4367
4368 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
4369 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
4370 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
4371 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
4372 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
4373 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
4374 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
4375
4376 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
4377
4378 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
4379 one can use the following shell script:</p>
4380
4381 <pre>
4382   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
4383     echo "$id" ; \
4384     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
4385   done
4386 </pre>
4387
4388 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
4389 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
4390
4391 <pre>
4392   acpi:ACPI0003:
4393     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
4394   acpi:device:
4395   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
4396   acpi:IBM0068:
4397     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
4398     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
4399     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
4400     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
4401   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
4402     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
4403     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
4404     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
4405   [...]
4406 </pre>
4407
4408 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
4409 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
4410 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
4411 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
4412
4413 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
4414 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
4415 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
4416
4417       </div>
4418       <div class="tags">
4419
4420
4421         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4422
4423
4424       </div>
4425     </div>
4426     <div class="padding"></div>
4427
4428     <div class="entry">
4429       <div class="title">
4430         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
4431       </div>
4432       <div class="date">
4433         10th January 2013
4434       </div>
4435       <div class="body">
4436         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
4437 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
4438 Launcher and updated the Debian package
4439 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
4440 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
4441 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
4442 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
4443 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
4444 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
4445 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
4446 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
4447 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
4448 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
4449 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
4450 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
4451 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
4452 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
4453 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
4454
4455       </div>
4456       <div class="tags">
4457
4458
4459         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4460
4461
4462       </div>
4463     </div>
4464     <div class="padding"></div>
4465
4466     <div class="entry">
4467       <div class="title">
4468         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
4469       </div>
4470       <div class="date">
4471          9th January 2013
4472       </div>
4473       <div class="body">
4474         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
4475 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
4476 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
4477 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
4478 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
4479 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
4480 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
4481 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
4482 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
4483 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
4484 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
4485
4486 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
4487 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
4488 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
4489 simple:
4490
4491 <ul>
4492
4493 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
4494   starting when a user log in.</li>
4495
4496 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
4497   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
4498
4499 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
4500   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
4501   packages.</li>
4502
4503 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
4504   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
4505
4506 </ul>
4507
4508 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
4509 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
4510 discover database to find packages and
4511 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
4512 packages.</p>
4513
4514 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
4515 draft package is now checked into
4516 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
4517 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
4518 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
4519 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
4520 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
4521 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
4522 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
4523 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
4524 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
4525 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
4526 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
4527 because of the freeze).</p>
4528
4529 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
4530 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
4531 inserted):</p>
4532
4533 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
4534
4535 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
4536 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
4537 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
4538
4539 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
4540 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
4541 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
4542 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
4543 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
4544 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
4545 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
4546
4547 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
4548 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
4549 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
4550 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
4551 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
4552 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
4553 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
4554 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
4555 not be installed?</p>
4556
4557 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
4558 please send me an email. :)</p>
4559
4560       </div>
4561       <div class="tags">
4562
4563
4564         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4565
4566
4567       </div>
4568     </div>
4569     <div class="padding"></div>
4570
4571     <div class="entry">
4572       <div class="title">
4573         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
4574       </div>
4575       <div class="date">
4576          2nd January 2013
4577       </div>
4578       <div class="body">
4579         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
4580 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
4581 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
4582 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
4583 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
4584 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
4585 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
4586 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
4587 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
4588 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
4589
4590 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
4591 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
4592 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
4593
4594       </div>
4595       <div class="tags">
4596
4597
4598         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4599
4600
4601       </div>
4602     </div>
4603     <div class="padding"></div>
4604
4605     <div class="entry">
4606       <div class="title">
4607         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
4608       </div>
4609       <div class="date">
4610         25th December 2012
4611       </div>
4612       <div class="body">
4613         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
4614 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
4615
4616 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
4617 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
4618 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
4619 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
4620 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
4621 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
4622 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
4623 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
4624 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
4625 name.</p>
4626
4627 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
4628 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
4629 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
4630
4631 <blockquote><pre>
4632 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
4633 cd bitcoin
4634 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
4635 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
4636 </pre></blockquote>
4637
4638 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
4639 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
4640 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
4641 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
4642 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
4643 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
4644 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
4645 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
4646 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
4647
4648 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4649 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4650 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4651
4652       </div>
4653       <div class="tags">
4654
4655
4656         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4657
4658
4659       </div>
4660     </div>
4661     <div class="padding"></div>
4662
4663     <div class="entry">
4664       <div class="title">
4665         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
4666       </div>
4667       <div class="date">
4668         21st December 2012
4669       </div>
4670       <div class="body">
4671         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
4672 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
4673 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
4674 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
4675 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
4676 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
4677 is now maintained by a
4678 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
4679 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
4680 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
4681 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
4682 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
4683 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
4684 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
4685 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
4686 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
4687 Corallo in a
4688 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
4689 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
4690 Debian package.</p>
4691
4692 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
4693 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
4694 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
4695 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
4696 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
4697 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
4698 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
4699 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
4700 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
4701 new version to unstable.
4702
4703 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
4704 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
4705 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
4706 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
4707 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
4708 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
4709 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
4710 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
4711 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
4712 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
4713 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
4714 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
4715 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
4716 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
4717 have not tested them.</p>
4718
4719 <p>My
4720 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
4721 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
4722 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
4723 years ago, as can be
4724 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
4725 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
4726 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
4727 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
4728 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
4729 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
4730 the same address as last time,
4731 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4732
4733       </div>
4734       <div class="tags">
4735
4736
4737         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4738
4739
4740       </div>
4741     </div>
4742     <div class="padding"></div>
4743
4744     <div class="entry">
4745       <div class="title">
4746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
4747       </div>
4748       <div class="date">
4749          7th September 2012
4750       </div>
4751       <div class="body">
4752         <p>As I
4753 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
4754 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
4755 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
4756 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
4757 repository for the project</a>.</p>
4758
4759 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
4760 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
4761 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
4762 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
4763
4764 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
4765 PostScript formats at
4766 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
4767 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
4768
4769       </div>
4770       <div class="tags">
4771
4772
4773         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4774
4775
4776       </div>
4777     </div>
4778     <div class="padding"></div>
4779
4780     <div class="entry">
4781       <div class="title">
4782         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
4783       </div>
4784       <div class="date">
4785         16th August 2012
4786       </div>
4787       <div class="body">
4788         <p>I dag fyller
4789 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
4790 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
4791 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
4792
4793       </div>
4794       <div class="tags">
4795
4796
4797         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
4798
4799
4800       </div>
4801     </div>
4802     <div class="padding"></div>
4803
4804     <div class="entry">
4805       <div class="title">
4806         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
4807       </div>
4808       <div class="date">
4809         24th June 2012
4810       </div>
4811       <div class="body">
4812         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
4813 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
4814 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
4815 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
4816 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
4817 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
4818 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
4819 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
4820 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
4821 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
4822 missing in my book.</p>
4823
4824 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
4825 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
4826 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
4827 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
4828 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
4829 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
4830 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
4831
4832       </div>
4833       <div class="tags">
4834
4835
4836         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4837
4838
4839       </div>
4840     </div>
4841     <div class="padding"></div>
4842
4843     <div class="entry">
4844       <div class="title">
4845         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
4846       </div>
4847       <div class="date">
4848         21st November 2011
4849       </div>
4850       <div class="body">
4851         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
4852 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
4853 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
4854 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
4855 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
4856 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
4857 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
4858 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
4859 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
4860 the tools to do so.</p>
4861
4862 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
4863 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
4864 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
4865 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
4866
4867 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
4868 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
4869 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
4870 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
4871 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
4872 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
4873 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
4874 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
4875
4876 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
4877 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
4878 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
4879
4880 <p><pre>
4881 #!/usr/bin/perl
4882 use strict;
4883 use warnings;
4884 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
4885 BEGIN {
4886     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
4887     my %rhelmodules = (
4888         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
4889         );
4890     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
4891         eval "use $module;";
4892         if ($@) {
4893             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
4894             system("yum install -y $pkg");
4895             eval "use $module;";
4896         }
4897     }
4898 }
4899 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
4900
4901 upgrade_dell();
4902
4903 exit 0;
4904
4905 sub run_firmware_script {
4906     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
4907     unless ($script) {
4908         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
4909         exit 1
4910     }
4911     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
4912
4913     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
4914         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
4915     } else {
4916         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
4917     }
4918 }
4919
4920 sub run_firmware_scripts {
4921     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
4922     # Run firmware packages
4923     for my $dir (@dirs) {
4924         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
4925         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
4926         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
4927             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
4928             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
4929         }
4930         closedir $dh;
4931     }
4932 }
4933
4934 sub download {
4935     my $url = shift;
4936     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
4937     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
4938 }
4939
4940 sub upgrade_dell {
4941     my @dirs;
4942     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
4943     chomp $product;
4944
4945     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
4946
4947         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
4948         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
4949
4950         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
4951             CLEANUP => 1
4952             );
4953         chdir($tmpdir);
4954         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
4955         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
4956         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
4957         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
4958         my $fwopts = "-q";
4959         if (@paths) {
4960             for my $url (@paths) {
4961                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
4962             }
4963             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
4964         } else {
4965             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
4966             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
4967         }
4968         chdir('/');
4969     } else {
4970         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
4971         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
4972     }
4973 }
4974
4975 sub fetch_dell_fw {
4976     my $path = shift;
4977     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
4978     download($url);
4979 }
4980
4981 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
4982 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
4983 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
4984 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
4985     my $filename = shift;
4986
4987     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
4988     chomp $product;
4989     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
4990
4991     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
4992
4993     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
4994     my @paths;
4995     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
4996         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
4997         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
4998         my $oscode;
4999         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
5000             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
5001         } else {
5002             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
5003         }
5004         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
5005         {
5006             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
5007         }
5008     }
5009     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
5010         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
5011
5012         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
5013         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
5014
5015         my $cpath = $component->{path};
5016         for my $path (@paths) {
5017             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
5018                 push(@paths, $cpath);
5019             }
5020         }
5021     }
5022     return @paths;
5023 }
5024 </pre>
5025
5026 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
5027 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
5028 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
5029 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
5030 outdated.</p>
5031
5032       </div>
5033       <div class="tags">
5034
5035
5036         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5037
5038
5039       </div>
5040     </div>
5041     <div class="padding"></div>
5042
5043     <div class="entry">
5044       <div class="title">
5045         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
5046       </div>
5047       <div class="date">
5048          4th August 2011
5049       </div>
5050       <div class="body">
5051         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
5052 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
5053 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
5054 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
5055 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
5056 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
5057 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
5058 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
5059 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
5060
5061 <p><blockquote>
5062 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
5063 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
5064 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
5065 </blockquote></p>
5066
5067 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
5068 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
5069 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
5070 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
5071 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
5072 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
5073 hard to explain.</p>
5074
5075 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
5076 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
5077 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
5078 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
5079 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
5080 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
5081 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
5082 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
5083 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
5084 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
5085 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
5086 mode).</p>
5087
5088 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
5089 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
5090 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
5091 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
5092 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
5093 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
5094 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
5095 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
5096 after visiting single user mode.</p>
5097
5098 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
5099 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
5100 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
5101 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
5102 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
5103 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
5104 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
5105 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
5106
5107 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
5108 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
5109 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
5110
5111       </div>
5112       <div class="tags">
5113
5114
5115         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5116
5117
5118       </div>
5119     </div>
5120     <div class="padding"></div>
5121
5122     <div class="entry">
5123       <div class="title">
5124         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
5125       </div>
5126       <div class="date">
5127         30th July 2011
5128       </div>
5129       <div class="body">
5130         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
5131 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
5132 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
5133 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
5134 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
5135 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
5136 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
5137 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
5138 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
5139 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
5140 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
5141 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
5142 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
5143
5144 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
5145 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
5146 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
5147 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
5148 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
5149 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
5150 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
5151 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
5152 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
5153
5154 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
5155 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
5156 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
5157 is presented.</p>
5158
5159 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
5160 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
5161 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
5162 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
5163 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
5164 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
5165 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
5166 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
5167 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
5168 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
5169 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
5170 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
5171 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
5172 find time to push this forward.</p>
5173
5174       </div>
5175       <div class="tags">
5176
5177
5178         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5179
5180
5181       </div>
5182     </div>
5183     <div class="padding"></div>
5184
5185     <div class="entry">
5186       <div class="title">
5187         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
5188       </div>
5189       <div class="date">
5190         29th July 2011
5191       </div>
5192       <div class="body">
5193         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
5194 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
5195 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
5196 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
5197 issues.</p>
5198
5199 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
5200 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
5201 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
5202
5203 <ol>
5204
5205 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
5206 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
5207 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
5208 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
5209 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
5210 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
5211 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
5212 Debian.</li>
5213
5214 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
5215 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
5216 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
5217 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
5218 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
5219 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
5220 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
5221 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
5222 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
5223 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
5224 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
5225 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
5226 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
5227
5228 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
5229 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
5230 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
5231 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
5232 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
5233 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
5234 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
5235 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
5236 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
5237 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
5238
5239 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
5240 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
5241 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
5242 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
5243 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
5244 latter behaviour.</li>
5245
5246 </ol>
5247
5248 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
5249 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
5250 it do not matter much.</p>
5251
5252 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
5253 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
5254 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
5255
5256       </div>
5257       <div class="tags">
5258
5259
5260         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5261
5262
5263       </div>
5264     </div>
5265     <div class="padding"></div>
5266
5267     <div class="entry">
5268       <div class="title">
5269         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
5270       </div>
5271       <div class="date">
5272         26th July 2011
5273       </div>
5274       <div class="body">
5275         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
5276 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
5277 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
5278 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
5279 security support for a few years.</p>
5280
5281 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
5282 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
5283 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
5284 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
5285 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
5286 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
5287 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
5288 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
5289 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
5290 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
5291 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
5292 easier in the future.</p>
5293
5294 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
5295 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
5296 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
5297 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
5298 do not have time for.</p>
5299
5300       </div>
5301       <div class="tags">
5302
5303
5304         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
5305
5306
5307       </div>
5308     </div>
5309     <div class="padding"></div>
5310
5311     <div class="entry">
5312       <div class="title">
5313         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
5314       </div>
5315       <div class="date">
5316          3rd April 2011
5317       </div>
5318       <div class="body">
5319         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
5320 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
5321 update in English.</p>
5322
5323 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
5324 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
5325 of the British service
5326 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
5327 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
5328 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
5329 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
5330 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
5331 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
5332 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
5333 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
5334 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
5335 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
5336 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
5337 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
5338 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
5339
5340 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
5341 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
5342 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
5343 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
5344 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
5345 public infrastructure.</p>
5346
5347 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
5348 such service?</p>
5349
5350       </div>
5351       <div class="tags">
5352
5353
5354         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
5355
5356
5357       </div>
5358     </div>
5359     <div class="padding"></div>
5360
5361     <div class="entry">
5362       <div class="title">
5363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
5364       </div>
5365       <div class="date">
5366         28th January 2011
5367       </div>
5368       <div class="body">
5369         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
5370 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
5371 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
5372 available on the Internet, and check our locally
5373 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
5374 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
5375 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
5376 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
5377 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
5378 out which security holes were present in our free software
5379 collection.</p>
5380
5381 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
5382 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
5383 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
5384 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
5385 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
5386 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
5387 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
5388 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
5389 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
5390 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
5391 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
5392 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
5393 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
5394 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
5395 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
5396 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
5397
5398 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
5399 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
5400 check out, one could look up
5401 <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
5402 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
5403 The most recent one is
5404 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
5405 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
5406 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
5407
5408 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
5409 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
5410 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
5411 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
5412 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
5413 security issues out.</p>
5414
5415 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
5416 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
5417 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
5418 RHEL is providing
5419 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
5420 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
5421 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
5422
5423 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
5424 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
5425 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
5426 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
5427 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
5428 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
5429 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
5430 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
5431 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
5432 established soon.</p>
5433
5434 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
5435 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
5436 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
5437 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
5438 for their packages.</p>
5439
5440       </div>
5441       <div class="tags">
5442
5443
5444         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5445
5446
5447       </div>
5448     </div>
5449     <div class="padding"></div>
5450
5451     <div class="entry">
5452       <div class="title">
5453         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
5454       </div>
5455       <div class="date">
5456         23rd January 2011
5457       </div>
5458       <div class="body">
5459         <p>In the
5460 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
5461 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
5462 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
5463 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
5464 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
5465 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
5466 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
5467 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
5468 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
5469 one of my machines like this:</p>
5470
5471 <pre>
5472 loaded modules:
5473 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
5474 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
5475 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
5476 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
5477 10de:03ec pata_amd
5478 10de:03f6 sata_nv
5479 1022:1103 k8temp
5480 109e:036e bttv
5481 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
5482 11ab:4364 sky2
5483 </pre>
5484
5485 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
5486 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
5487
5488 <pre>
5489 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
5490     echo loaded pci modules:
5491     (
5492         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
5493         for address in * ; do
5494             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
5495                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
5496                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
5497                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
5498                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
5499                     echo "$id $module"
5500                 fi
5501             fi
5502         done
5503     )
5504     echo
5505 fi
5506 </pre>
5507
5508 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
5509 mappings:</p>
5510
5511 <pre>
5512 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
5513     echo loaded usb modules:
5514     (
5515         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
5516         for address in * ; do
5517             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
5518                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
5519                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
5520                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
5521                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
5522                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
5523                         echo "$id $module"
5524                     fi
5525                 fi
5526             fi
5527         done
5528     )
5529     echo
5530 fi
5531 </pre>
5532
5533 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
5534 well.</p>
5535
5536       </div>
5537       <div class="tags">
5538
5539
5540         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5541
5542
5543       </div>
5544     </div>
5545     <div class="padding"></div>
5546
5547     <div class="entry">
5548       <div class="title">
5549         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
5550       </div>
5551       <div class="date">
5552         22nd December 2010
5553       </div>
5554       <div class="body">
5555         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
5556 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
5557 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
5558 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
5559 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
5560 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
5561 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
5562 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
5563 university.</p>
5564
5565 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
5566 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
5567 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
5568 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
5569 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
5570 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
5571 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
5572 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
5573
5574 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
5575 I perform on a new model.</p>
5576
5577 <ul>
5578
5579 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
5580 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
5581 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
5582
5583 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
5584 installation, X.org is working.</li>
5585
5586 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
5587 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
5588 reported by the program.</li>
5589
5590 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
5591 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
5592 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
5593 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
5594 normally test this by playing
5595 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
5596 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
5597
5598 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
5599 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
5600
5601 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
5602 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
5603
5604 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
5605 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
5606
5607 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
5608 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
5609 few.</li>
5610
5611 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
5612 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
5613 notice this.</li>
5614
5615 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
5616 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
5617 resume.</li>
5618
5619 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
5620 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
5621 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
5622 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
5623 not.</li>
5624
5625 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
5626 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
5627 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
5628 existence.</li>
5629
5630 </ul>
5631
5632 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
5633 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
5634 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
5635 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
5636 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
5637 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
5638 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
5639 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
5640
5641       </div>
5642       <div class="tags">
5643
5644
5645         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5646
5647
5648       </div>
5649     </div>
5650     <div class="padding"></div>
5651
5652     <div class="entry">
5653       <div class="title">
5654         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
5655       </div>
5656       <div class="date">
5657         11th December 2010
5658       </div>
5659       <div class="body">
5660         <p>As I continue to explore
5661 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
5662 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
5663 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
5664
5665 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
5666 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
5667 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
5668 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
5669 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
5670 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
5671 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
5672 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
5673 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
5674 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
5675 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
5676 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
5677 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
5678 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
5679 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
5680 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
5681 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
5682 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
5683 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
5684 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
5685
5686 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
5687 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
5688 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
5689 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
5690 If the Skolelinux foundation
5691 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
5692 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
5693 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
5694 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
5695 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
5696 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
5697 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
5698 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
5699
5700 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
5701 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
5702 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
5703 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
5704 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
5705 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
5706 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
5707 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
5708 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
5709 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
5710 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
5711 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
5712 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
5713 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
5714 currencies.</p>
5715
5716 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
5717 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
5718 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
5719 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
5720 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
5721 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
5722 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
5723 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
5724 BitCoins.  Check out
5725 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
5726 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
5727 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
5728 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
5729 yet.</p>
5730
5731 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
5732 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
5733 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
5734 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
5735 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
5736
5737       </div>
5738       <div class="tags">
5739
5740
5741         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5742
5743
5744       </div>
5745     </div>
5746     <div class="padding"></div>
5747
5748     <div class="entry">
5749       <div class="title">
5750         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
5751       </div>
5752       <div class="date">
5753         10th December 2010
5754       </div>
5755       <div class="body">
5756         <p>With this weeks lawless
5757 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
5758 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
5759 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
5760 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
5761 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
5762 A blog post from
5763 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
5764 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
5765 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
5766 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
5767 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
5768 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
5769 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
5770
5771 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
5772 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
5773 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
5774 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
5775 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
5776 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
5777 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
5778 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
5779 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
5780 Debian</a> soon.</p>
5781
5782 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
5783 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
5784 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
5785 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
5786 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
5787 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
5788 you can even get
5789 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
5790 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
5791 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
5792 on the current exchange rates.</p>
5793
5794 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
5795 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
5796 donations to the address
5797 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
5798
5799       </div>
5800       <div class="tags">
5801
5802
5803         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5804
5805
5806       </div>
5807     </div>
5808     <div class="padding"></div>
5809
5810     <div class="entry">
5811       <div class="title">
5812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
5813       </div>
5814       <div class="date">
5815         27th November 2010
5816       </div>
5817       <div class="body">
5818         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
5819 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
5820 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
5821 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
5822 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
5823 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
5824 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
5825 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
5826
5827 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
5828 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
5829 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
5830 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
5831 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
5832 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
5833 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
5834 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
5835 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
5836 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
5837 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
5838
5839 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
5840 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
5841 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
5842 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
5843 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
5844 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
5845 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
5846 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
5847 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
5848 what is going on.</p>
5849
5850       </div>
5851       <div class="tags">
5852
5853
5854         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5855
5856
5857       </div>
5858     </div>
5859     <div class="padding"></div>
5860
5861     <div class="entry">
5862       <div class="title">
5863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
5864       </div>
5865       <div class="date">
5866         22nd November 2010
5867       </div>
5868       <div class="body">
5869         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
5870 upgrade testing of the
5871 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
5872 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
5873 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
5874 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
5875
5876 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
5877
5878 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
5879
5880 <blockquote><p>
5881   apache2.2-bin
5882   aptdaemon
5883   baobab
5884   binfmt-support
5885   browser-plugin-gnash
5886   cheese-common
5887   cli-common
5888   cups-pk-helper
5889   dmz-cursor-theme
5890   empathy
5891   empathy-common
5892   freedesktop-sound-theme
5893   freeglut3
5894   gconf-defaults-service
5895   gdm-themes
5896   gedit-plugins
5897   geoclue
5898   geoclue-hostip
5899   geoclue-localnet
5900   geoclue-manual
5901   geoclue-yahoo
5902   gnash
5903   gnash-common
5904   gnome
5905   gnome-backgrounds
5906   gnome-cards-data
5907   gnome-codec-install
5908   gnome-core
5909   gnome-desktop-environment
5910   gnome-disk-utility
5911   gnome-screenshot
5912   gnome-search-tool
5913   gnome-session-canberra
5914   gnome-system-log
5915   gnome-themes-extras
5916   gnome-themes-more
5917   gnome-user-share
5918   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
5919   gstreamer0.10-tools
5920   gtk2-engines
5921   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
5922   gtk2-engines-smooth
5923   hamster-applet
5924   libapache2-mod-dnssd
5925   libapr1
5926   libaprutil1
5927   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
5928   libaprutil1-ldap
5929   libart2.0-cil
5930   libboost-date-time1.42.0
5931   libboost-python1.42.0
5932   libboost-thread1.42.0
5933   libchamplain-0.4-0
5934   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
5935   libcheese-gtk18
5936   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
5937   libcryptui0
5938   libdiscid0
5939   libelf1
5940   libepc-1.0-2
5941   libepc-common
5942   libepc-ui-1.0-2
5943   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
5944   libfreerdp0
5945   libgconf2.0-cil
5946   libgdata-common
5947   libgdata7
5948   libgdu-gtk0
5949   libgee2
5950   libgeoclue0
5951   libgexiv2-0
5952   libgif4
5953   libglade2.0-cil
5954   libglib2.0-cil
5955   libgmime2.4-cil
5956   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
5957   libgnome2.24-cil
5958   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
5959   libgpod-common
5960   libgpod4
5961   libgtk2.0-cil
5962   libgtkglext1
5963   libgtksourceview2.0-common
5964   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
5965   libmono-addins0.2-cil
5966   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
5967   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
5968   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
5969   libmono-posix2.0-cil
5970   libmono-security2.0-cil
5971   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
5972   libmono-system2.0-cil
5973   libmtp8
5974   libmusicbrainz3-6
5975   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
5976   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
5977   libopal3.6.8
5978   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
5979   libpt2.6.7
5980   libpython2.6
5981   librpm1
5982   librpmio1
5983   libsdl1.2debian
5984   libsrtp0
5985   libssh-4
5986   libtelepathy-farsight0
5987   libtelepathy-glib0
5988   libtidy-0.99-0
5989   media-player-info
5990   mesa-utils
5991   mono-2.0-gac
5992   mono-gac
5993   mono-runtime
5994   nautilus-sendto
5995   nautilus-sendto-empathy
5996   p7zip-full
5997   pkg-config
5998   python-aptdaemon
5999   python-aptdaemon-gtk
6000   python-axiom
6001   python-beautifulsoup
6002   python-bugbuddy
6003   python-clientform
6004   python-coherence
6005   python-configobj
6006   python-crypto
6007   python-cupshelpers
6008   python-elementtree
6009   python-epsilon
6010   python-evolution
6011   python-feedparser
6012   python-gdata
6013   python-gdbm
6014   python-gst0.10
6015   python-gtkglext1
6016   python-gtksourceview2
6017   python-httplib2
6018   python-louie
6019   python-mako
6020   python-markupsafe
6021   python-mechanize
6022   python-nevow
6023   python-notify
6024   python-opengl
6025   python-openssl
6026   python-pam
6027   python-pkg-resources
6028   python-pyasn1
6029   python-pysqlite2
6030   python-rdflib
6031   python-serial
6032   python-tagpy
6033   python-twisted-bin
6034   python-twisted-conch
6035   python-twisted-core
6036   python-twisted-web
6037   python-utidylib
6038   python-webkit
6039   python-xdg
6040   python-zope.interface
6041   remmina
6042   remmina-plugin-data
6043   remmina-plugin-rdp
6044   remmina-plugin-vnc
6045   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
6046   rhythmbox-plugins
6047   rpm-common
6048   rpm2cpio
6049   seahorse-plugins
6050   shotwell
6051   software-center
6052   system-config-printer-udev
6053   telepathy-gabble
6054   telepathy-mission-control-5
6055   telepathy-salut
6056   tomboy
6057   totem
6058   totem-coherence
6059   totem-mozilla
6060   totem-plugins
6061   transmission-common
6062   xdg-user-dirs
6063   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
6064   xserver-xephyr
6065 </p></blockquote>
6066
6067 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
6068
6069 <blockquote><p>
6070   cheese
6071   ekiga
6072   eog
6073   epiphany-extensions
6074   evolution-exchange
6075   fast-user-switch-applet
6076   file-roller
6077   gcalctool
6078   gconf-editor
6079   gdm
6080   gedit
6081   gedit-common
6082   gnome-games
6083   gnome-games-data
6084   gnome-nettool
6085   gnome-system-tools
6086   gnome-themes
6087   gnuchess
6088   gucharmap
6089   guile-1.8-libs
6090   libavahi-ui0
6091   libdmx1
6092   libgalago3
6093   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
6094   libgtksourceview2.0-0
6095   liblircclient0
6096   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
6097   libspeexdsp1
6098   libsvga1
6099   rhythmbox
6100   seahorse
6101   sound-juicer
6102   system-config-printer
6103   totem-common
6104   transmission-gtk
6105   vinagre
6106   vino
6107 </p></blockquote>
6108
6109 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6110
6111 <blockquote><p>
6112   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
6113 </p></blockquote>
6114
6115 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6116
6117 <blockquote><p>
6118 [nothing]
6119 </p></blockquote>
6120
6121 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
6122
6123 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
6124
6125 <blockquote><p>
6126   ksmserver
6127 </p></blockquote>
6128
6129 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
6130
6131 <blockquote><p>
6132   kwin
6133   network-manager-kde
6134 </p></blockquote>
6135
6136 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6137
6138 <blockquote><p>
6139   arts
6140   dolphin
6141   freespacenotifier
6142   google-gadgets-gst
6143   google-gadgets-xul
6144   kappfinder
6145   kcalc
6146   kcharselect
6147   kde-core
6148   kde-plasma-desktop
6149   kde-standard
6150   kde-window-manager
6151   kdeartwork
6152   kdeartwork-emoticons
6153   kdeartwork-style
6154   kdeartwork-theme-icon
6155   kdebase
6156   kdebase-apps
6157   kdebase-workspace
6158   kdebase-workspace-bin
6159   kdebase-workspace-data
6160   kdeeject
6161   kdelibs
6162   kdeplasma-addons
6163   kdeutils
6164   kdewallpapers
6165   kdf
6166   kfloppy
6167   kgpg
6168   khelpcenter4
6169   kinfocenter
6170   konq-plugins-l10n
6171   konqueror-nsplugins
6172   kscreensaver
6173   kscreensaver-xsavers
6174   ktimer
6175   kwrite
6176   libgle3
6177   libkde4-ruby1.8
6178   libkonq5
6179   libkonq5-templates
6180   libnetpbm10
6181   libplasma-ruby
6182   libplasma-ruby1.8
6183   libqt4-ruby1.8
6184   marble-data
6185   marble-plugins
6186   netpbm
6187   nuvola-icon-theme
6188   plasma-dataengines-workspace
6189   plasma-desktop
6190   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
6191   plasma-runners-addons
6192   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
6193   plasma-scriptengine-python
6194   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
6195   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
6196   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
6197   plasma-scriptengines
6198   plasma-wallpapers-addons
6199   plasma-widget-folderview
6200   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
6201   ruby
6202   sweeper
6203   update-notifier-kde
6204   xscreensaver-data-extra
6205   xscreensaver-gl
6206   xscreensaver-gl-extra
6207   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
6208 </p></blockquote>
6209
6210 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6211
6212 <blockquote><p>
6213   ark
6214   google-gadgets-common
6215   google-gadgets-qt
6216   htdig
6217   kate
6218   kdebase-bin
6219   kdebase-data
6220   kdepasswd
6221   kfind
6222   klipper
6223   konq-plugins
6224   konqueror
6225   ksysguard
6226   ksysguardd
6227   libarchive1
6228   libcln6
6229   libeet1
6230   libeina-svn-06
6231   libggadget-1.0-0b
6232   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
6233   libgps19
6234   libkdecorations4
6235   libkephal4
6236   libkonq4
6237   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
6238   libkscreensaver5
6239   libksgrd4
6240   libksignalplotter4
6241   libkunitconversion4
6242   libkwineffects1a
6243   libmarblewidget4
6244   libntrack-qt4-1
6245   libntrack0
6246   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
6247   libplasmaclock4a
6248   libplasmagenericshell4
6249   libprocesscore4a
6250   libprocessui4a
6251   libqalculate5
6252   libqedje0a
6253   libqtruby4shared2
6254   libqzion0a
6255   libruby1.8
6256   libscim8c2a
6257   libsmokekdecore4-3
6258   libsmokekdeui4-3
6259   libsmokekfile3
6260   libsmokekhtml3
6261   libsmokekio3
6262   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
6263   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
6264   libsmokekparts3
6265   libsmokektexteditor3
6266   libsmokekutils3
6267   libsmokenepomuk3
6268   libsmokephonon3
6269   libsmokeplasma3
6270   libsmokeqtcore4-3
6271   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
6272   libsmokeqtgui4-3
6273   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
6274   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
6275   libsmokeqtscript4-3
6276   libsmokeqtsql4-3
6277   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
6278   libsmokeqttest4-3
6279   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
6280   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
6281   libsmokeqtxml4-3
6282   libsmokesolid3
6283   libsmokesoprano3
6284   libtaskmanager4a
6285   libtidy-0.99-0
6286   libweather-ion4a
6287   libxklavier16
6288   libxxf86misc1
6289   okteta
6290   oxygencursors
6291   plasma-dataengines-addons
6292   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
6293   plasma-widget-lancelot
6294   plasma-widgets-addons
6295   plasma-widgets-workspace
6296   polkit-kde-1
6297   ruby1.8
6298   systemsettings
6299   update-notifier-common
6300 </p></blockquote>
6301
6302 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
6303 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
6304 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
6305 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
6306
6307       </div>
6308       <div class="tags">
6309
6310
6311         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6312
6313
6314       </div>
6315     </div>
6316     <div class="padding"></div>
6317
6318     <div class="entry">
6319       <div class="title">
6320         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
6321       </div>
6322       <div class="date">
6323         22nd November 2010
6324       </div>
6325       <div class="body">
6326         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
6327 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
6328 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
6329 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
6330 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
6331 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
6332 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
6333 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
6334 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
6335
6336 <p>I found
6337 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
6338 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
6339 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
6340 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
6341 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
6342 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
6343
6344 <pre>
6345 #!/bin/sh
6346
6347 # Based on
6348 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
6349
6350 set -e
6351 set -x
6352
6353 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
6354     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
6355     exit 1
6356 else
6357     host="$1"
6358 fi
6359
6360 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
6361     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
6362     exit 1
6363 fi
6364
6365 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
6366 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
6367 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
6368 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
6369
6370 img=$host.img
6371 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
6372 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
6373
6374 parted $img mklabel msdos
6375 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
6376 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
6377 parted $img set 1 boot on
6378
6379 modprobe dm-mod
6380 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
6381 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
6382
6383 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
6384 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
6385 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
6386
6387 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
6388 losetup -d /dev/loop0
6389 </pre>
6390
6391 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
6392 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
6393
6394 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
6395 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
6396 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
6397 seem to work just fine.</p>
6398
6399       </div>
6400       <div class="tags">
6401
6402
6403         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6404
6405
6406       </div>
6407     </div>
6408     <div class="padding"></div>
6409
6410     <div class="entry">
6411       <div class="title">
6412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
6413       </div>
6414       <div class="date">
6415         20th November 2010
6416       </div>
6417       <div class="body">
6418         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
6419 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
6420 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
6421 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
6422
6423 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
6424 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
6425 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
6426
6427 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
6428
6429 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
6430
6431 <blockquote><p>
6432   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
6433   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
6434   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
6435   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
6436   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
6437   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
6438   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
6439   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
6440   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
6441   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
6442   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
6443   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
6444   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
6445   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
6446   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
6447   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
6448   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
6449   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
6450   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
6451   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
6452   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
6453   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
6454   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
6455   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
6456   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
6457   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
6458   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
6459   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
6460   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
6461   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
6462   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
6463   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
6464   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
6465   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
6466   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
6467   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
6468   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
6469   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
6470   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
6471   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
6472   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
6473   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
6474   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
6475   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
6476   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
6477   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
6478   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
6479   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
6480   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
6481   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
6482   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
6483   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
6484   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
6485   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
6486   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
6487   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
6488   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
6489   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
6490   zip
6491 </p></blockquote>
6492
6493 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
6494
6495 <blockquote><p>
6496   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
6497   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
6498   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
6499   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
6500   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
6501   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
6502   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
6503   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
6504   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
6505   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
6506   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
6507   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
6508   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
6509   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
6510   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
6511   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
6512   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
6513   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
6514   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
6515   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
6516   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
6517   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
6518   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
6519   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
6520   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
6521   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
6522   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
6523   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
6524   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
6525 </p></blockquote>
6526
6527 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6528
6529 <blockquote><p>
6530   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
6531 </p></blockquote>
6532
6533 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6534
6535 <blockquote><p>
6536 [nothing]
6537 </p></blockquote>
6538
6539 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
6540
6541 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
6542
6543 <blockquote><p>
6544   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
6545   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
6546   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
6547   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
6548   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
6549   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
6550   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
6551   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
6552   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
6553   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
6554   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
6555   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
6556   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
6557   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
6558   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
6559   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
6560   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
6561   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
6562   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
6563   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
6564   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
6565   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
6566   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
6567   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
6568   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
6569   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
6570   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
6571   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
6572   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
6573   ttf-sazanami-gothic
6574 </p></blockquote>
6575
6576 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
6577
6578 <blockquote><p>
6579   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
6580   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
6581   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
6582   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
6583   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
6584   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
6585   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
6586   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
6587   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
6588   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
6589   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
6590   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
6591   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
6592   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
6593   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
6594   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
6595   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
6596   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
6597   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
6598   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
6599   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
6600   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
6601   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
6602   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
6603   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
6604   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
6605   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
6606   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
6607   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
6608   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
6609   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
6610   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
6611   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
6612 </p></blockquote>
6613
6614 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
6615
6616 <blockquote><p>
6617   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
6618   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
6619   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
6620   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
6621   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
6622   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
6623   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
6624 </p></blockquote>
6625
6626 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
6627
6628 <blockquote><p>
6629   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
6630 </p></blockquote>
6631
6632       </div>
6633       <div class="tags">
6634
6635
6636         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6637
6638
6639       </div>
6640     </div>
6641     <div class="padding"></div>
6642
6643     <div class="entry">
6644       <div class="title">
6645         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
6646       </div>
6647       <div class="date">
6648         20th November 2010
6649       </div>
6650       <div class="body">
6651         <p>Answering
6652 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
6653 call from the Gnash project</a> for
6654 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
6655 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
6656 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
6657 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
6658 releases out more often.</p>
6659
6660 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
6661 I have considered setting up a <a
6662 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
6663 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
6664 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
6665 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
6666 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
6667 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
6668 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
6669 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
6670 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
6671 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
6672 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
6673 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
6674
6675       </div>
6676       <div class="tags">
6677
6678
6679         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6680
6681
6682       </div>
6683     </div>
6684     <div class="padding"></div>
6685
6686     <div class="entry">
6687       <div class="title">
6688         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
6689       </div>
6690       <div class="date">
6691          9th November 2010
6692       </div>
6693       <div class="body">
6694         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
6695
6696 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
6697 3D linked in from
6698 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
6699 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
6700
6701       </div>
6702       <div class="tags">
6703
6704
6705         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6706
6707
6708       </div>
6709     </div>
6710     <div class="padding"></div>
6711
6712     <div class="entry">
6713       <div class="title">
6714         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
6715       </div>
6716       <div class="date">
6717         24th October 2010
6718       </div>
6719       <div class="body">
6720         <p>Some updates.</p>
6721
6722 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
6723 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
6724 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
6725 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
6726 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
6727 :)</p>
6728
6729 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
6730 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
6731 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
6732 It is called
6733 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
6734 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
6735 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
6736 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
6737 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
6738 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
6739
6740 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
6741 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
6742 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
6743 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
6744 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
6745 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
6746 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
6747 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
6748 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
6749 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
6750
6751       </div>
6752       <div class="tags">
6753
6754
6755         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
6756
6757
6758       </div>
6759     </div>
6760     <div class="padding"></div>
6761
6762     <div class="entry">
6763       <div class="title">
6764         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
6765       </div>
6766       <div class="date">
6767          4th September 2010
6768       </div>
6769       <div class="body">
6770         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
6771 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
6772 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
6773 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
6774 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
6775 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
6776 installed.</p>
6777
6778 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
6779 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
6780 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
6781 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
6782 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
6783 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
6784 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
6785 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
6786 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
6787
6788 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
6789 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
6790 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
6791 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
6792 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
6793 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
6794 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
6795 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
6796 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
6797 pages they want to visit.</p>
6798
6799 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
6800 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
6801 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
6802 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
6803 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
6804 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
6805 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
6806 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
6807 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
6808 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
6809 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
6810
6811       </div>
6812       <div class="tags">
6813
6814
6815         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6816
6817
6818       </div>
6819     </div>
6820     <div class="padding"></div>
6821
6822     <div class="entry">
6823       <div class="title">
6824         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
6825       </div>
6826       <div class="date">
6827         27th July 2010
6828       </div>
6829       <div class="body">
6830         <p>I discovered this while doing
6831 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
6832 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
6833 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
6834 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
6835 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
6836
6837 <p>An example is from todays
6838 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
6839 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
6840 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
6841 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
6842 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
6843 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
6844 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
6845
6846 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
6847
6848 <blockquote><pre>
6849 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
6850  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
6851   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
6852 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
6853  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
6854 </pre></blockquote>
6855
6856 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
6857 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
6858 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
6859 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
6860 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
6861 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
6862 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
6863 of dependency loops.</p>
6864
6865 <p>Thanks to
6866 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
6867 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
6868 dependencies
6869 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
6870 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
6871
6872 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
6873 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
6874 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
6875 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
6876 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
6877 it.</p>
6878
6879       </div>
6880       <div class="tags">
6881
6882
6883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6884
6885
6886       </div>
6887     </div>
6888     <div class="padding"></div>
6889
6890     <div class="entry">
6891       <div class="title">
6892         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
6893       </div>
6894       <div class="date">
6895         17th July 2010
6896       </div>
6897       <div class="body">
6898         <p>This is a
6899 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
6900 on my
6901 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
6902 work</a> on
6903 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
6904 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
6905
6906 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
6907 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
6908 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
6909 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
6910
6911 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
6912 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
6913 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
6914
6915 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
6916
6917 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
6918 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
6919 the web.
6920
6921 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
6922 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
6923 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
6924 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
6925 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
6926 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
6927
6928 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
6929 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
6930 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
6931 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
6932 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
6933 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
6934 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
6935 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
6936 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
6937 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
6938 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
6939 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
6940 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
6941 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
6942 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
6943 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
6944
6945 <blockquote><pre>
6946 ldapsearch -h ldap \
6947   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
6948   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
6949   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
6950   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
6951   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
6952   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
6953
6954 ldapsearch -h ldap \
6955   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
6956   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
6957   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
6958   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
6959   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
6960 </pre></blockquote>
6961
6962 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
6963 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
6964 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
6965 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6966 also exist.</p>
6967
6968 <blockquote><pre>
6969 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6970 objectclass: top
6971 objectclass: dnsdomain
6972 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
6973 dc: tjener
6974 arecord: 10.0.2.2
6975 associateddomain: tjener.intern
6976
6977 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6978 objectclass: top
6979 objectclass: dnsdomain2
6980 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
6981 dc: 2
6982 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
6983 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
6984 </pre></blockquote>
6985
6986 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
6987 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
6988 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
6989 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
6990 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
6991 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
6992 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
6993 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
6994 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
6995 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
6996 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
6997 instead.</p>
6998
6999 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
7000 like this:</p>
7001
7002 <blockquote><pre>
7003 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
7004   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
7005   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
7006   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
7007   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
7008   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
7009
7010 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
7011   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
7012 </pre></blockquote>
7013
7014 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
7015 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
7016 reverse lookups.</p>
7017
7018 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
7019 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
7020 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
7021 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
7022
7023 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
7024 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
7025 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
7026
7027 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
7028 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
7029 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
7030 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
7031 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
7032
7033 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
7034 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
7035 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
7036 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
7037 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
7038
7039 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
7040 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
7041 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
7042 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
7043 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
7044 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
7045
7046 <blockquote><pre>
7047 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
7048     SUP top
7049     AUXILIARY
7050     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
7051           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
7052           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
7053           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
7054           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
7055     ))
7056 </pre></blockquote>
7057
7058 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
7059 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
7060 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
7061 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
7062 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
7063 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
7064
7065 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
7066
7067 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
7068 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
7069 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
7070 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
7071 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
7072
7073 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
7074 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
7075 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
7076 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
7077
7078 <blockquote><pre>
7079 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
7080 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
7081 </pre></blockquote>
7082
7083 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
7084 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
7085 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
7086 search result is this entry:</p>
7087
7088 <blockquote><pre>
7089 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7090 cn: dhcp
7091 objectClass: top
7092 objectClass: dhcpServer
7093 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7094 </pre></blockquote>
7095
7096 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
7097 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
7098 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
7099 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
7100 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
7101 The search result is this entry:</p>
7102
7103 <blockquote><pre>
7104 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7105 cn: DHCP Config
7106 objectClass: top
7107 objectClass: dhcpService
7108 objectClass: dhcpOptions
7109 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7110 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
7111 dhcpStatements: authoritative
7112 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
7113 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
7114 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
7115 </pre></blockquote>
7116
7117 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
7118 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
7119 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
7120 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
7121 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
7122 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
7123 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
7124 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
7125 related computer objects.</p>
7126
7127 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
7128 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
7129 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
7130 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
7131 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
7132 like:</p>
7133
7134 <blockquote><pre>
7135 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7136 cn: hostname
7137 objectClass: top
7138 objectClass: dhcpHost
7139 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
7140 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
7141 </pre></blockquote>
7142
7143 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
7144 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
7145 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
7146 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
7147 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
7148 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
7149 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
7150 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
7151 structural object class.
7152
7153 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
7154
7155 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
7156 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
7157 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
7158 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
7159 in the configuration.</p>
7160
7161 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
7162 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
7163 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
7164 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
7165 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
7166 structure.</p>
7167
7168 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
7169 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
7170
7171 <blockquote><pre>
7172 ou=services
7173   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
7174     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
7175     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
7176       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
7177         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
7178     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
7179       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
7180         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
7181     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
7182       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
7183 </pre></blockquote>
7184
7185 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
7186 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
7187 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
7188 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
7189
7190 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
7191 like this:</p>
7192
7193 <blockquote><pre>
7194 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7195 dc: hostname
7196 objectClass: top
7197 objectClass: dhcpHost
7198 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
7199 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
7200 associateddomain: hostname.intern
7201 arecord: 10.11.12.13
7202 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
7203 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
7204 </pre></blockquote>
7205
7206 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
7207 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
7208 auxiliary object class.</p>
7209
7210       </div>
7211       <div class="tags">
7212
7213
7214         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7215
7216
7217       </div>
7218     </div>
7219     <div class="padding"></div>
7220
7221     <div class="entry">
7222       <div class="title">
7223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
7224       </div>
7225       <div class="date">
7226         14th July 2010
7227       </div>
7228       <div class="body">
7229         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
7230 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
7231 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
7232 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
7233 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
7234
7235 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
7236 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
7237
7238 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
7239 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
7240 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
7241 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
7242 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
7243 to a slave DNS server.</p>
7244
7245 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
7246 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
7247 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
7248 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
7249 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
7250 seem to work.</p>
7251
7252 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
7253 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
7254 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
7255 this:</p>
7256
7257 <blockquote><pre>
7258   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
7259   cn: hostname
7260   objectClass: dhcphost
7261   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
7262   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
7263   associateddomain: hostname.intern
7264   arecord: 10.11.12.13
7265   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
7266   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
7267   ldapconfigsound: Y
7268 </pre></blockquote>
7269
7270 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
7271 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
7272 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
7273 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
7274
7275 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
7276 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
7277 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
7278 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
7279 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
7280 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
7281 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
7282 might be a good place to put it.</p>
7283
7284 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
7285 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
7286
7287       </div>
7288       <div class="tags">
7289
7290
7291         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7292
7293
7294       </div>
7295     </div>
7296     <div class="padding"></div>
7297
7298     <div class="entry">
7299       <div class="title">
7300         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
7301       </div>
7302       <div class="date">
7303         11th July 2010
7304       </div>
7305       <div class="body">
7306         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
7307 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
7308 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
7309 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
7310
7311 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
7312 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
7313 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
7314 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
7315 LTSP clients.</p>
7316
7317 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
7318 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
7319 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
7320
7321 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
7322 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
7323 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
7324
7325 <blockquote><pre>
7326 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
7327 #
7328 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
7329 #
7330 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
7331 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
7332 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
7333 #
7334 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
7335 # existence of attribute names.
7336 #
7337 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
7338 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
7339 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
7340 #
7341 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
7342 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
7343 #
7344 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
7345 #     SUP top
7346 #     AUXILIARY
7347 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
7348
7349 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
7350 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
7351     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
7352     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
7353         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
7354         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
7355             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
7356             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
7357             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
7358             # bass value on to clients
7359             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
7360         done
7361     done
7362 fi
7363 </pre></blockquote>
7364
7365 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
7366 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
7367 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
7368 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
7369 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
7370
7371 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
7372 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
7373
7374 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
7375 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
7376 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
7377 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
7378 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
7379 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
7380
7381       </div>
7382       <div class="tags">
7383
7384
7385         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7386
7387
7388       </div>
7389     </div>
7390     <div class="padding"></div>
7391
7392     <div class="entry">
7393       <div class="title">
7394         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
7395       </div>
7396       <div class="date">
7397          9th July 2010
7398       </div>
7399       <div class="body">
7400         <p>Since
7401 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
7402 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
7403 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
7404 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
7405 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
7406 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
7407 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
7408 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
7409 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
7410 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
7411 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
7412 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
7413 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
7414
7415       </div>
7416       <div class="tags">
7417
7418
7419         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7420
7421
7422       </div>
7423     </div>
7424     <div class="padding"></div>
7425
7426     <div class="entry">
7427       <div class="title">
7428         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
7429       </div>
7430       <div class="date">
7431          3rd July 2010
7432       </div>
7433       <div class="body">
7434         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
7435 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
7436 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
7437 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
7438 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
7439 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
7440 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
7441 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
7442
7443 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
7444 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
7445 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
7446 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
7447 publish the difference.</p>
7448
7449 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
7450
7451 <blockquote><p>
7452   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
7453   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
7454   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
7455   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
7456   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
7457   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
7458   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
7459   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
7460 </p></blockquote>
7461
7462 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
7463
7464 <blockquote><p>
7465   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
7466   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
7467   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
7468   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
7469   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
7470   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
7471   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
7472   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
7473   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
7474   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
7475   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
7476   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
7477   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
7478   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
7479   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
7480   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
7481   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
7482   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
7483   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
7484   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
7485 </p></blockquote>
7486
7487 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
7488
7489 <blockquote><p>
7490   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
7491   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
7492   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
7493   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
7494   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
7495   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
7496   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
7497   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
7498   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
7499   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
7500   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
7501   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
7502   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
7503   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
7504   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
7505   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
7506   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
7507   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
7508   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
7509   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
7510   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
7511 </p></blockquote>
7512
7513 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
7514
7515 <blockquote><p>
7516   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
7517   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
7518   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
7519 </p></blockquote>
7520
7521 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
7522 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
7523 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
7524 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
7525 the difference somewhat.
7526
7527       </div>
7528       <div class="tags">
7529
7530
7531         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7532
7533
7534       </div>
7535     </div>
7536     <div class="padding"></div>
7537
7538     <div class="entry">
7539       <div class="title">
7540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
7541       </div>
7542       <div class="date">
7543         28th June 2010
7544       </div>
7545       <div class="body">
7546         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
7547 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
7548 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
7549 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
7550 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
7551 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
7552 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
7553 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
7554 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
7555 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
7556
7557 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
7558 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
7559 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
7560 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
7561 released.</p>
7562
7563 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
7564 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
7565 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
7566 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
7567
7568 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
7569 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
7570
7571 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
7572 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
7573 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
7574 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
7575 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
7576
7577       </div>
7578       <div class="tags">
7579
7580
7581         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7582
7583
7584       </div>
7585     </div>
7586     <div class="padding"></div>
7587
7588     <div class="entry">
7589       <div class="title">
7590         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
7591       </div>
7592       <div class="date">
7593         24th June 2010
7594       </div>
7595       <div class="body">
7596         <p>A while back, I
7597 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
7598 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
7599 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
7600 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
7601
7602 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
7603 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
7604 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
7605 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
7606
7607 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
7608 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
7609 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
7610 Debian Edu.</p>
7611
7612 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
7613 the
7614 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
7615 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
7616 available today from IETF.</p>
7617
7618 <pre>
7619 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
7620 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
7621 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
7622  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
7623         NAME 'dhcpHost'
7624         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
7625 -       SUP top
7626 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
7627         MUST cn
7628         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
7629         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
7630 </pre>
7631
7632 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
7633 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
7634 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
7635
7636 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
7637 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
7638
7639       </div>
7640       <div class="tags">
7641
7642
7643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7644
7645
7646       </div>
7647     </div>
7648     <div class="padding"></div>
7649
7650     <div class="entry">
7651       <div class="title">
7652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
7653       </div>
7654       <div class="date">
7655         16th June 2010
7656       </div>
7657       <div class="body">
7658         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
7659 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
7660 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
7661 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
7662 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
7663 this:
7664
7665 <blockquote><pre>
7666 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
7667 tasksel --new-install
7668 </pre></blockquote>
7669
7670 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
7671 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
7672 any output what so ever.
7673
7674 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
7675 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
7676 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
7677 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
7678 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
7679 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
7680 code like this:
7681
7682 <blockquote><pre>
7683 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
7684 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
7685 $cmd
7686 </pre></blockquote>
7687
7688 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
7689 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
7690 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
7691 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
7692 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
7693 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
7694 installation.</p>
7695
7696 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
7697 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
7698 like this.</p>
7699
7700       </div>
7701       <div class="tags">
7702
7703
7704         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7705
7706
7707       </div>
7708     </div>
7709     <div class="padding"></div>
7710
7711     <div class="entry">
7712       <div class="title">
7713         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
7714       </div>
7715       <div class="date">
7716         13th June 2010
7717       </div>
7718       <div class="body">
7719         <p>My
7720 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
7721 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
7722 finally made the upgrade logs available from
7723 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
7724 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
7725 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
7726 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
7727
7728 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
7729 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
7730 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
7731 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
7732 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
7733 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
7734 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
7735 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
7736
7737 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
7738 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
7739 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
7740 too surprising.</p>
7741
7742 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
7743 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
7744 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
7745 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
7746 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
7747 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
7748 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
7749 continue.</p>
7750
7751 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
7752 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
7753   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
7754   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
7755   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
7756   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
7757   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
7758   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
7759   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
7760   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
7761   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
7762   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
7763   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
7764   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
7765   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
7766   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
7767   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
7768   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
7769   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
7770   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
7771   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
7772   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
7773   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
7774   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
7775   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
7776   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
7777   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
7778   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
7779   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
7780   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
7781
7782 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
7783
7784 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
7785   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
7786   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
7787   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
7788   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
7789   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
7790   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
7791   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
7792   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
7793   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
7794   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
7795   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
7796   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
7797   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
7798   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
7799   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
7800   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
7801   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
7802   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
7803   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
7804   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
7805   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
7806   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
7807   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
7808   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
7809   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
7810   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
7811   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
7812   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
7813   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
7814   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
7815   zip</p>
7816
7817 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
7818
7819 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
7820   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
7821   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
7822   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
7823   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
7824   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
7825   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
7826   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
7827   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
7828   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
7829   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
7830   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
7831   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
7832   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
7833   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
7834   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
7835   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
7836   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
7837   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
7838   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
7839   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
7840   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
7841   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
7842   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
7843   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
7844   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
7845   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
7846   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
7847
7848 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
7849 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
7850   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
7851   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
7852   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
7853   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
7854   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
7855   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
7856   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
7857   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
7858   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
7859   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
7860   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
7861   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
7862   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
7863   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
7864   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
7865   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
7866   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
7867   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
7868   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
7869   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
7870   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
7871   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
7872   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
7873   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
7874   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
7875   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
7876   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
7877   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
7878   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
7879   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
7880   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
7881   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
7882   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
7883   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
7884   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
7885   xulrunner-1.9</p>
7886
7887
7888       </div>
7889       <div class="tags">
7890
7891
7892         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7893
7894
7895       </div>
7896     </div>
7897     <div class="padding"></div>
7898
7899     <div class="entry">
7900       <div class="title">
7901         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
7902       </div>
7903       <div class="date">
7904         11th June 2010
7905       </div>
7906       <div class="body">
7907         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
7908 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
7909 have been discovered and reported in the process
7910 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
7911 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
7912 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
7913 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
7914 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
7915
7916 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
7917 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
7918 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
7919 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
7920 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
7921 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
7922
7923 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
7924 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
7925 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
7926 is created.  The bug report
7927 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
7928 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
7929 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
7930 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
7931 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
7932 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
7933 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
7934 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
7935 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
7936 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
7937 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
7938 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
7939 Debian Squeeze.</p>
7940
7941 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
7942 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
7943 trick:</p>
7944
7945 <blockquote><pre>
7946 #!/bin/sh
7947 set -ex
7948
7949 if [ "$1" ] ; then
7950     desktop=$1
7951 else
7952     desktop=gnome
7953 fi
7954
7955 from=lenny
7956 to=squeeze
7957
7958 exec &lt; /dev/null
7959 unset LANG
7960 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
7961 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
7962 fuser -mv .
7963 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
7964 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
7965 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
7966 #!/bin/sh
7967 exit 101
7968 EOF
7969 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
7970 exit_cleanup() {
7971     umount $tmpdir/proc
7972 }
7973 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
7974 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
7975 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
7976
7977 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
7978
7979 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
7980 # to return the correct answers.
7981 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
7982     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
7983
7984 # Include the desktop and laptop task
7985 for test in desktop laptop ; do
7986     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
7987 #!/bin/sh
7988 exit 2
7989 EOF
7990     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
7991 done
7992
7993 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
7994 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
7995 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
7996 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
7997
7998 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
7999 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
8000 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
8001 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
8002 fuser -mv
8003 </pre></blockquote>
8004
8005 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
8006 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
8007 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
8008 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
8009 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
8010 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
8011
8012 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
8013 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
8014 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
8015 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
8016 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
8017 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
8018 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
8019
8020 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
8021 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
8022 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
8023 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
8024 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
8025 packages.</p>
8026
8027       </div>
8028       <div class="tags">
8029
8030
8031         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8032
8033
8034       </div>
8035     </div>
8036     <div class="padding"></div>
8037
8038     <div class="entry">
8039       <div class="title">
8040         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
8041       </div>
8042       <div class="date">
8043          6th June 2010
8044       </div>
8045       <div class="body">
8046         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
8047 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
8048 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
8049 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
8050 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
8051 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
8052 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
8053
8054 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
8055 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
8056 COLUMNS):</p>
8057
8058 <blockquote><pre>
8059 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
8060 previous=N
8061 PREVLEVEL=
8062 RUNLEVEL=
8063 runlevel=S
8064 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
8065 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
8066 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
8067 </pre></blockquote>
8068
8069 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
8070 script.</p>
8071
8072 <blockquote><pre>
8073 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
8074 previous=N
8075 PREVLEVEL=N
8076 RUNLEVEL=S
8077 runlevel=S
8078 </pre></blockquote>
8079
8080 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
8081 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
8082 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
8083
8084 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
8085 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
8086 choice.</p>
8087
8088       </div>
8089       <div class="tags">
8090
8091
8092         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8093
8094
8095       </div>
8096     </div>
8097     <div class="padding"></div>
8098
8099     <div class="entry">
8100       <div class="title">
8101         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
8102       </div>
8103       <div class="date">
8104          6th June 2010
8105       </div>
8106       <div class="body">
8107         <p>Via the
8108 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
8109 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
8110 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
8111 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
8112 following the standards wars of today.</p>
8113
8114       </div>
8115       <div class="tags">
8116
8117
8118         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
8119
8120
8121       </div>
8122     </div>
8123     <div class="padding"></div>
8124
8125     <div class="entry">
8126       <div class="title">
8127         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
8128       </div>
8129       <div class="date">
8130          3rd June 2010
8131       </div>
8132       <div class="body">
8133         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
8134 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
8135 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
8136 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
8137 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
8138
8139 <blockquote><pre>
8140 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
8141   vendor                    count
8142   Dell Computer Corporation     1
8143     PowerEdge 1750              1
8144   IBM                           1
8145     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
8146   Intel                         2
8147   [no-dmi-info]                 3
8148 maintainer:~#
8149 </pre></blockquote>
8150
8151 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
8152 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
8153 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
8154 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
8155 option to list the individual machines.</p>
8156
8157 <p>A larger list is
8158 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
8159 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
8160 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
8161 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
8162 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
8163 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
8164 collector.</p>
8165
8166       </div>
8167       <div class="tags">
8168
8169
8170         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
8171
8172
8173       </div>
8174     </div>
8175     <div class="padding"></div>
8176
8177     <div class="entry">
8178       <div class="title">
8179         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
8180       </div>
8181       <div class="date">
8182          1st June 2010
8183       </div>
8184       <div class="body">
8185         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
8186 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
8187 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
8188 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
8189 wait.</p>
8190
8191 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
8192 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
8193 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
8194 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
8195 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
8196 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
8197
8198 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
8199 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
8200 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
8201 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
8202 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
8203 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
8204 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
8205 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
8206
8207 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
8208
8209       </div>
8210       <div class="tags">
8211
8212
8213         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8214
8215
8216       </div>
8217     </div>
8218     <div class="padding"></div>
8219
8220     <div class="entry">
8221       <div class="title">
8222         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
8223       </div>
8224       <div class="date">
8225         27th May 2010
8226       </div>
8227       <div class="body">
8228         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
8229 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
8230 issues are known and should be solved:
8231
8232 <p><ul>
8233
8234 <li>The wicd package seen to
8235 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
8236 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
8237 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
8238 seem to be on the case.</li>
8239
8240 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
8241 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
8242 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
8243 maintainer is on the case.</li>
8244
8245 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
8246 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
8247 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
8248 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
8249 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
8250 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
8251 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
8252 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
8253
8254 </ul></p>
8255
8256 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
8257 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
8258 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
8259 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
8260
8261 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
8262 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
8263 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
8264 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
8265
8266 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
8267
8268       </div>
8269       <div class="tags">
8270
8271
8272         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8273
8274
8275       </div>
8276     </div>
8277     <div class="padding"></div>
8278
8279     <div class="entry">
8280       <div class="title">
8281         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
8282       </div>
8283       <div class="date">
8284         22nd May 2010
8285       </div>
8286       <div class="body">
8287         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
8288 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
8289 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
8290 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
8291
8292 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
8293 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
8294 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
8295 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
8296 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
8297 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
8298 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
8299 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
8300 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
8301 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
8302 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
8303 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
8304 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
8305 going to work.</p>
8306
8307 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
8308 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
8309 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
8310 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
8311 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
8312 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
8313 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
8314 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
8315 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
8316 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
8317 Edu.</p>
8318
8319 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
8320 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
8321 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
8322 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
8323 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
8324 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
8325
8326 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
8327 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
8328
8329       </div>
8330       <div class="tags">
8331
8332
8333         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8334
8335
8336       </div>
8337     </div>
8338     <div class="padding"></div>
8339
8340     <div class="entry">
8341       <div class="title">
8342         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
8343       </div>
8344       <div class="date">
8345         14th May 2010
8346       </div>
8347       <div class="body">
8348         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
8349 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
8350 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
8351 expected, if I am to believe the
8352 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
8353 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
8354 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
8355 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
8356 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
8357 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
8358 version.</p>
8359
8360 More information about
8361 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
8362 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
8363 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
8364 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
8365
8366 <blockquote><pre>
8367 CONCURRENCY=none
8368 </pre></blockquote>
8369
8370 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
8371 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
8372 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
8373 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
8374
8375       </div>
8376       <div class="tags">
8377
8378
8379         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8380
8381
8382       </div>
8383     </div>
8384     <div class="padding"></div>
8385
8386     <div class="entry">
8387       <div class="title">
8388         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
8389       </div>
8390       <div class="date">
8391         14th May 2010
8392       </div>
8393       <div class="body">
8394         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
8395 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
8396 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
8397 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
8398 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
8399 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
8400 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
8401 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
8402
8403 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
8404 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
8405 this on the collector host:</p>
8406
8407 <blockquote><pre>
8408 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
8409 </pre></blockquote>
8410
8411 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
8412 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
8413
8414 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
8415 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
8416 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
8417 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
8418 written yet.</p>
8419
8420       </div>
8421       <div class="tags">
8422
8423
8424         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
8425
8426
8427       </div>
8428     </div>
8429     <div class="padding"></div>
8430
8431     <div class="entry">
8432       <div class="title">
8433         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
8434       </div>
8435       <div class="date">
8436         13th May 2010
8437       </div>
8438       <div class="body">
8439         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
8440 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
8441 has been
8442 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
8443
8444 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
8445 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
8446 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
8447 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
8448 based boot system.  Tollef is
8449 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
8450 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
8451 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
8452 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
8453 at the moment do not.</p>
8454
8455 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
8456 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
8457 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
8458 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
8459 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
8460 way forward.</p>
8461
8462 <p>In the mean time, based on the
8463 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
8464 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
8465 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
8466 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
8467 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
8468 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
8469 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
8470 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
8471
8472       </div>
8473       <div class="tags">
8474
8475
8476         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8477
8478
8479       </div>
8480     </div>
8481     <div class="padding"></div>
8482
8483     <div class="entry">
8484       <div class="title">
8485         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
8486       </div>
8487       <div class="date">
8488          6th May 2010
8489       </div>
8490       <div class="body">
8491         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
8492 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
8493 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
8494 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
8495 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
8496 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
8497 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
8498
8499 <blockquote><pre>
8500 CONCURRENCY=makefile
8501 </pre></blockquote>
8502
8503 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
8504 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
8505 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
8506 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
8507 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
8508 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
8509 make this happen.</p>
8510
8511 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
8512 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
8513 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
8514 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
8515 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
8516
8517 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
8518 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
8519 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
8520 fix the remaining issues.</p>
8521
8522 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
8523 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
8524 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
8525 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
8526
8527       </div>
8528       <div class="tags">
8529
8530
8531         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8532
8533
8534       </div>
8535     </div>
8536     <div class="padding"></div>
8537
8538     <div class="entry">
8539       <div class="title">
8540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
8541       </div>
8542       <div class="date">
8543         27th July 2009
8544       </div>
8545       <div class="body">
8546         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
8547 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
8548 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
8549 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
8550 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
8551 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
8552 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
8553
8554 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
8555 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
8556 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
8557
8558       </div>
8559       <div class="tags">
8560
8561
8562         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8563
8564
8565       </div>
8566     </div>
8567     <div class="padding"></div>
8568
8569     <div class="entry">
8570       <div class="title">
8571         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
8572       </div>
8573       <div class="date">
8574         22nd July 2009
8575       </div>
8576       <div class="body">
8577         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
8578 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
8579 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
8580 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
8581 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
8582 the package up to date.</p>
8583
8584 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
8585 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
8586 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
8587 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
8588 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
8589 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
8590 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
8591 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
8592 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
8593 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
8594 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
8595 working on the future release.</p>
8596
8597 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
8598 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
8599
8600       </div>
8601       <div class="tags">
8602
8603
8604         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8605
8606
8607       </div>
8608     </div>
8609     <div class="padding"></div>
8610
8611     <div class="entry">
8612       <div class="title">
8613         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
8614       </div>
8615       <div class="date">
8616         24th June 2009
8617       </div>
8618       <div class="body">
8619         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
8620 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
8621 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
8622 funded
8623 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
8624 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
8625 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
8626 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
8627 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
8628 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
8629
8630 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
8631 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
8632 boot:</p>
8633
8634 <ul>
8635
8636 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
8637
8638 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
8639    clock is in UTC.</li>
8640
8641 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
8642    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
8643    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
8644
8645 </ul>
8646
8647 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
8648 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
8649 Villegas</a>.
8650
8651 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
8652 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
8653 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
8654 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
8655 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
8656 using this.</p>
8657
8658 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
8659 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
8660 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
8661 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
8662 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
8663 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
8664 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
8665
8666       </div>
8667       <div class="tags">
8668
8669
8670         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8671
8672
8673       </div>
8674     </div>
8675     <div class="padding"></div>
8676
8677     <div class="entry">
8678       <div class="title">
8679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
8680       </div>
8681       <div class="date">
8682         17th May 2009
8683       </div>
8684       <div class="body">
8685         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
8686 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
8687 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
8688 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
8689 dager siden kom
8690 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
8691 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
8692 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
8693 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
8694 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
8695
8696 <blockquote>
8697 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
8698 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
8699 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
8700 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
8701 </blockquote>
8702
8703 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
8704 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
8705 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
8706 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
8707 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
8708
8709 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
8710 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
8711 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
8712
8713       </div>
8714       <div class="tags">
8715
8716
8717         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
8718
8719
8720       </div>
8721     </div>
8722     <div class="padding"></div>
8723
8724     <div class="entry">
8725       <div class="title">
8726         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/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>
8727       </div>
8728       <div class="date">
8729          7th May 2009
8730       </div>
8731       <div class="body">
8732         <p>Kom over
8733 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
8734 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
8735 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
8736 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
8737 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
8738 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
8739 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
8740
8741       </div>
8742       <div class="tags">
8743
8744
8745         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8746
8747
8748       </div>
8749     </div>
8750     <div class="padding"></div>
8751
8752     <div class="entry">
8753       <div class="title">
8754         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
8755       </div>
8756       <div class="date">
8757          2nd May 2009
8758       </div>
8759       <div class="body">
8760         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
8761 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
8762 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
8763 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
8764 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
8765 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
8766 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
8767 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
8768 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
8769 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
8770 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
8771 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
8772 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
8773 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
8774 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
8775 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
8776 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
8777 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
8778 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
8779 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
8780
8781 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
8782 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
8783 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
8784 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
8785 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
8786 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
8787 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
8788 betydelige.</p>
8789
8790       </div>
8791       <div class="tags">
8792
8793
8794         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
8795
8796
8797       </div>
8798     </div>
8799     <div class="padding"></div>
8800
8801     <div class="entry">
8802       <div class="title">
8803         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
8804       </div>
8805       <div class="date">
8806          2nd May 2009
8807       </div>
8808       <div class="body">
8809         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
8810 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
8811 do not yet know them.</p>
8812
8813 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
8814 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
8815 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
8816 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
8817 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
8818 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
8819 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
8820 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
8821 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
8822 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
8823 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
8824
8825 <p>The second one is
8826 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
8827 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
8828 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
8829 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
8830 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
8831 and the company behind it is running
8832 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
8833 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
8834 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
8835 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
8836 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
8837 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
8838 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
8839 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
8840
8841 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
8842 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
8843 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
8844 surrounded by today.</p>
8845
8846       </div>
8847       <div class="tags">
8848
8849
8850         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8851
8852
8853       </div>
8854     </div>
8855     <div class="padding"></div>
8856
8857     <div class="entry">
8858       <div class="title">
8859         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
8860       </div>
8861       <div class="date">
8862         28th April 2009
8863       </div>
8864       <div class="body">
8865         <p>Julien Blache
8866 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
8867 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
8868 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
8869 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
8870 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
8871 properties.</p>
8872
8873       </div>
8874       <div class="tags">
8875
8876
8877         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8878
8879
8880       </div>
8881     </div>
8882     <div class="padding"></div>
8883
8884     <div class="entry">
8885       <div class="title">
8886         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
8887       </div>
8888       <div class="date">
8889         30th March 2009
8890       </div>
8891       <div class="body">
8892         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
8893 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
8894 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
8895 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
8896 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
8897 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
8898 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
8899 application.</p>
8900
8901 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
8902 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
8903 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
8904 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
8905 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
8906 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
8907 blocked from doing so.</p>
8908
8909 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
8910 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
8911 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
8912 requirements change.</p>
8913
8914 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
8915 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
8916 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
8917
8918       </div>
8919       <div class="tags">
8920
8921
8922         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
8923
8924
8925       </div>
8926     </div>
8927     <div class="padding"></div>
8928
8929     <div class="entry">
8930       <div class="title">
8931         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
8932       </div>
8933       <div class="date">
8934         29th March 2009
8935       </div>
8936       <div class="body">
8937         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
8938 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
8939 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
8940 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
8941 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
8942 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
8943 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
8944 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
8945 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
8946 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
8947 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
8948 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
8949 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
8950 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
8951 now. :)</p>
8952
8953       </div>
8954       <div class="tags">
8955
8956
8957         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8958
8959
8960       </div>
8961     </div>
8962     <div class="padding"></div>
8963
8964     <div class="entry">
8965       <div class="title">
8966         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
8967       </div>
8968       <div class="date">
8969         29th March 2009
8970       </div>
8971       <div class="body">
8972         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
8973 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
8974 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
8975 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
8976 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
8977 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
8978
8979 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
8980 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
8981 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
8982 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
8983 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
8984 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
8985 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
8986 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
8987 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
8988 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
8989 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
8990 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
8991 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
8992
8993 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
8994 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
8995 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
8996 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
8997
8998 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
8999 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
9000
9001 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
9002 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
9003 new IETF work group?</p>
9004
9005       </div>
9006       <div class="tags">
9007
9008
9009         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9010
9011
9012       </div>
9013     </div>
9014     <div class="padding"></div>
9015
9016     <div class="entry">
9017       <div class="title">
9018         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
9019       </div>
9020       <div class="date">
9021         15th February 2009
9022       </div>
9023       <div class="body">
9024         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
9025 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
9026 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
9027 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
9028 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
9029 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
9030 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
9031 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
9032 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
9033 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
9034 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
9035 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
9036
9037       </div>
9038       <div class="tags">
9039
9040
9041         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
9042
9043
9044       </div>
9045     </div>
9046     <div class="padding"></div>
9047
9048     <div class="entry">
9049       <div class="title">
9050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
9051       </div>
9052       <div class="date">
9053          7th December 2008
9054       </div>
9055       <div class="body">
9056         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
9057 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
9058 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
9059 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
9060 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
9061 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
9062 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
9063 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
9064
9065 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
9066 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
9067 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
9068 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
9069 of these cards.</p>
9070
9071       </div>
9072       <div class="tags">
9073
9074
9075         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
9076
9077
9078       </div>
9079     </div>
9080     <div class="padding"></div>
9081
9082     <div class="entry">
9083       <div class="title">
9084         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
9085       </div>
9086       <div class="date">
9087         25th November 2008
9088       </div>
9089       <div class="body">
9090         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
9091 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
9092 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
9093 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
9094 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
9095 notes are available on
9096 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
9097 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
9098 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
9099 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
9100 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
9101 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
9102 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
9103 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
9104 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
9105
9106 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
9107 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
9108
9109       </div>
9110       <div class="tags">
9111
9112
9113         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9114
9115
9116       </div>
9117     </div>
9118     <div class="padding"></div>
9119
9120     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
9121     <div id="sidebar">
9122
9123
9124
9125 <h2>Archive</h2>
9126 <ul>
9127
9128 <li>2015
9129 <ul>
9130
9131 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
9132
9133 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
9134
9135 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
9136
9137 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
9138
9139 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
9140
9141 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
9142
9143 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
9144
9145 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (1)</a></li>
9146
9147 </ul></li>
9148
9149 <li>2014
9150 <ul>
9151
9152 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
9153
9154 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
9155
9156 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
9157
9158 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
9159
9160 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
9161
9162 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
9163
9164 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
9165
9166 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
9167
9168 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
9169
9170 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
9171
9172 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
9173
9174 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
9175
9176 </ul></li>
9177
9178 <li>2013
9179 <ul>
9180
9181 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
9182
9183 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
9184
9185 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
9186
9187 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
9188
9189 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
9190
9191 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
9192
9193 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
9194
9195 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
9196
9197 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
9198
9199 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
9200
9201 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
9202
9203 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
9204
9205 </ul></li>
9206
9207 <li>2012
9208 <ul>
9209
9210 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
9211
9212 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
9213
9214 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
9215
9216 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
9217
9218 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
9219
9220 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
9221
9222 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
9223
9224 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
9225
9226 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
9227
9228 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
9229
9230 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
9231
9232 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
9233
9234 </ul></li>
9235
9236 <li>2011
9237 <ul>
9238
9239 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
9240
9241 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
9242
9243 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
9244
9245 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
9246
9247 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
9248
9249 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
9250
9251 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
9252
9253 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
9254
9255 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
9256
9257 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
9258
9259 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
9260
9261 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
9262
9263 </ul></li>
9264
9265 <li>2010
9266 <ul>
9267
9268 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
9269
9270 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
9271
9272 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
9273
9274 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
9275
9276 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
9277
9278 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
9279
9280 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
9281
9282 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
9283
9284 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
9285
9286 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
9287
9288 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
9289
9290 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
9291
9292 </ul></li>
9293
9294 <li>2009
9295 <ul>
9296
9297 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
9298
9299 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
9300
9301 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
9302
9303 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
9304
9305 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
9306
9307 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
9308
9309 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
9310
9311 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
9312
9313 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
9314
9315 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
9316
9317 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
9318
9319 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
9320
9321 </ul></li>
9322
9323 <li>2008
9324 <ul>
9325
9326 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
9327
9328 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
9329
9330 </ul></li>
9331
9332 </ul>
9333
9334
9335
9336 <h2>Tags</h2>
9337 <ul>
9338
9339  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
9340
9341  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
9342
9343  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
9344
9345  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
9346
9347  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (8)</a></li>
9348
9349  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
9350
9351  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
9352
9353  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
9354
9355  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (111)</a></li>
9356
9357  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (153)</a></li>
9358
9359  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
9360
9361  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
9362
9363  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (15)</a></li>
9364
9365  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
9366
9367  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (285)</a></li>
9368
9369  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
9370
9371  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
9372
9373  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (17)</a></li>
9374
9375  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
9376
9377  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (16)</a></li>
9378
9379  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
9380
9381  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
9382
9383  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (10)</a></li>
9384
9385  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
9386
9387  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
9388
9389  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
9390
9391  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
9392
9393  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
9394
9395  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
9396
9397  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (36)</a></li>
9398
9399  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (264)</a></li>
9400
9401  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (177)</a></li>
9402
9403  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (19)</a></li>
9404
9405  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
9406
9407  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (53)</a></li>
9408
9409  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (86)</a></li>
9410
9411  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
9412
9413  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
9414
9415  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
9416
9417  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
9418
9419  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
9420
9421  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
9422
9423  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
9424
9425  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
9426
9427  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (41)</a></li>
9428
9429  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
9430
9431  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
9432
9433  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (48)</a></li>
9434
9435  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
9436
9437  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
9438
9439  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (33)</a></li>
9440
9441  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
9442
9443  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
9444
9445  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
9446
9447  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (54)</a></li>
9448
9449  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
9450
9451  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (37)</a></li>
9452
9453 </ul>
9454
9455
9456     </div>
9457     <p style="text-align: right">
9458  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
9459 </p>
9460
9461   </body>
9462 </html>