+ <item>
+ <title>A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
+project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
+Agency in Trondheim. NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
+December 24th. I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
+present. As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
+funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
+gatherings, this donation was most welcome. One developer gathering
+cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
+development pace we want. Thus, I hope their example this year is
+followed by many others. :)</p>
+
+<p>The public list of donors can be found on
+<a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
+donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
+you want to donate to the project.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 25 Dec 2012 20:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
+year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
+
+<p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
+decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
+between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
+experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
+<a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
+The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
+package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
+in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
+for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
+name.</p>
+
+<p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
+team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
+using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
+cd bitcoin
+DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
+DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
+list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
+bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
+client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
+around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
+~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
+all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
+there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
+not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>A word on bitcoin support in Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:59:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It has been a while since I wrote about
+<a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
+peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
+have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
+state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
+Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
+is now maintained by a
+<a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
+people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
+owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
+But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
+Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
+backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
+it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
+situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
+reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
+Corallo in a
+<a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
+Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
+Debian package.</p>
+
+<p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
+IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
+improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
+me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
+package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
+setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
+patch to backport</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
+it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
+new version to unstable.
+
+<p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
+centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
+find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
+transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
+that the major credit card companies can block legal money
+transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
+need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
+they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
+Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
+Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
+pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
+in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
+use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
+quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
+have not tested them.</p>
+
+<p>My
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
+with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
+I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
+years ago, as can be
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
+on the blockexplorer service</a>. Thank you everyone for your
+donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
+bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
+number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
+to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
+the same address as last time,
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
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