<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
<atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <item>
+ <title>ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2012 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>In january, I
+<a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
+the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
+<a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
+the color on a computer screen. The software required is
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
+in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
+batch. Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
+opportunity to order. Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
+delivery. I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
+should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
+
+<p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
+colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
+drivers. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Dør Unix, eller lever den videre som Linux?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/D_r_Unix__eller_lever_den_videre_som_Linux_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/D_r_Unix__eller_lever_den_videre_som_Linux_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 10:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Peter Hidas fra Gartner melder i Computerworld at
+<a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article245011.ece">Unix
+nedkjempes av Linux og Windows</a>. For meg er påstanden meningsløs,
+da Linux er en variant av Unix, og hele diskusjonen om Linux er Unix
+eller ikke er utdatert og uinteressant. Jeg ser at Helge Skrivervik
+deler mitt syn på saken i sin kommentar fra i går om at
+"<a href="http://www.mymayday.com/blogs/2012/unix-linux">Unix vs. Linux
+= uinteressant"</a>.</p>
+
+<p>I <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>-sammenheng møter jeg av og
+til folk som tror NUUG er for avdankede folk som driver med den samme
+Unix-varianten som Peter Hidas skriver om i sin kommentar, og dermed
+er en foreningen for avdankede teknologer interessert i døende
+teknologi. Intet kunne være lengre fra sannheten.</p>
+
+<p>NUUG er en forening for oss som har sans for fri programvare, åpne
+standarder og Unix-lignende operativsystemer, som Ubuntu, FreeBSD,
+Debian, Mint, Gentoo, Android, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Firefox, LibreOffice,
+ODF, HTML, C++, ECMA-Script, etc. Kort sagt der nyskapning skjer på
+IT-fronten i dag. Det innebærer selvfølgelig også de som er
+interessert i de "gamle" Unix-ene som Solaris og HP-UX, men de er bare
+et lite mindretall blant NUUGs medlemmer. De aller fleste medlemmene
+har i dag fokus på Linux.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 13 May 2012 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
+publish another interview with the people behind
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
+This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
+years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
+details get right before release.
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
+Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as
+certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
+international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a
+certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
+documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
+I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
+manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
+
+<p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
+it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
+home since 2006.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
+daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
+middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
+him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
+asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
+computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
+
+<p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
+running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
+gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
+network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
+and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
+to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
+building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
+Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
+being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
+costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
+school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
+people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
+prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
+managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
+the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
+Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
+for me as today.</p>
+
+<p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
+they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
+
+<li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
+cost.</li>
+
+<li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
+schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
+clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
+infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
+server</li>
+
+<li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
+school.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
+came up in this way:</p>
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
+now.</li>
+
+<li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
+have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
+because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
+
+<li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
+management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
+interfaces used in the past.</li>
+
+<li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
+different needs.</li>
+
+<li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
+
+<li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
+world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
+is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
+
+<li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
+solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
+their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
+whole municipality areas.</li>
+
+<li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
+enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
+politicians.</li>
+
+<li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
+computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
+use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
+KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
+need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
+screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
+
+<p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
+and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
+rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
+with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
+and the whole family. I probably forgot something.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
+Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
+countries and areas all over the world.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Intervju med digi.no om Norge Digitalt og Openstreetmap</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intervju_med_digi_no_om_Norge_Digitalt_og_Openstreetmap.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intervju_med_digi_no_om_Norge_Digitalt_og_Openstreetmap.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 11 May 2012 23:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I går ble jeg kontaktet på epost av
+<a href="http://www.digi.no">digi.no</a>s Eirik Rossen som lurte på om
+jeg hadde noen kommentarer til
+<a href="http://www.statkart.no/statkart.ny.no/nor/Statens_kartverk/Om_Statens_kartverk/Pressesenter/Nyhetsarkiv/Nyheter_2012/mai/Norge+i+tet+på+digitale+kartdata.d25-SwZLMWg.ips">kartverkets
+pressemelding</a> om Norges tetplassering når det gjelder
+kart-tilgjengelighet. Jeg svarte følgende, som resulterte i noen
+sitater i
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/895420/norge-i-tet-paa-digitale-kartdata#debatt">Digis
+dekning</a> av kartverkets pressemelding.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+<p>Takk for muligheten til å kommentere.</p>
+
+<p>Pressemeldingen omhandler tilgjengeligheten av kart for aktører som er
+medlem i kartellet Norge Digitalt. Det er ingen overraskelse for meg
+at tilgjengeligheten til kart hos disse medlemmene er god. Men for
+oss på utsiden av kartellet er tilgjengelighet av det som burde være
+felleskapets og innbyggernes kart dårlig.</p>
+
+<p>Bruksvilkårene til kartene fra medlemmene i Norge Digital hindrer
+nyskapning og selv om en er villig til å betale den ublu prisen som
+forlanges får en fortsatt ikke tilgang til kartdata uten
+bruksbegresninger. Derfor bruker jeg heller tid på å gjøre
+fribrukskartet OpenStreetmap bedre. Der fremmer bruksvilkårene
+nyskapning og lar meg skape nye tjenester uten å måtte søke om
+tillatelse fra det offentlige.</p>
+
+<p>En annen problemstilling er jo sikkerhet til fjells og til sjøs.
+Mon tro hvor mange ulykker på sjøen som kunne vært unngått hvis
+sjøkartdata var tilgjengelig uten bruksbegrensninger, slik at enhver
+med GPS eller kartplotter tilnærmet kostnadsfritt kunne sikre seg mest
+mulig oppdaterte sjøkart? Det hjelper jo ikke at offentlige etater
+har enkel tilgang til sjøkartene når det samme ikke gjelder hver
+båtkaptein og småbåtfører. Jeg tror samfunnet som helhet hadde tjent
+på å unngå kostnadene ved disse ulykkene ved å tvinge sjøkartverket
+til å publisere sine kartdata på Internet uten bruksbegresninger.</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html</link>
cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did
not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a
-while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hair dresser that we
+while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these
are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers". The hair saloons
can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones
available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their
efficiency. It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
-minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hair dresser I visited had
+minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had
a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
<p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not
-straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hair dresser
+straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on
the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
around NOK 4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and
<a href="http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/search.html?q=skolelinux">Skolelinux-søket</a>
til DUO...</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
-Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
-setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
-Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
-years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
-up in the recently released
-<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
-Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
-studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
-Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
-Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
-teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
-information technology and science/technology.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
-project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
-qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
-contributing.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
-out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
-Debian Project!</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
-downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
-setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
-possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
-long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
-because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
-rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
-
-<p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
-project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
-on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
-mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
-have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
-Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
-politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader". The school
-administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
-Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
-free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
-of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
-
-<p>To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
-political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
-However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
-the system. There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
-"Free/Open Standards". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
-a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
-fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
-software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Jeg skal på konferansen Go Open 2012</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jeg_skal_p__konferansen_Go_Open_2012.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jeg_skal_p__konferansen_Go_Open_2012.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>Jeg har tenkt meg på konferansen <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go
-Open 2012</a> i Oslo 23. april.
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Medlemsforeningen NUUG</a> deler ut
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/prisen/">prisen for fremme av fri
-programvare i Norge</a> der i år. Kommer du?</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 8 Apr 2012 10:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
-like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
-and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
-contributor to the
-<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
-Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
-occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
-reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
-around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
-they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
-through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
-"localisation".</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I
-had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
-education system.</p>
-
-<p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
-as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
-everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
-money on the latest hardware.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
-software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
-words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
-with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
-you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Fri, 6 Apr 2012 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>Recently I have spent time with
-<a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
-up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
-Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
-process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
-menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
-due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
-the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
-passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
-
-NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
-ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
-ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
-Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
-the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
-non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
-one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
-around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
-
-<p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
-directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
-(almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
-and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
-mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
-requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
-<a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
-from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
-
-<p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
-kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
-used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
-for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
-icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
-these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
-for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
-one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
-almost instantaneous. I'm not quite sure where to make the package
-publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
-
-<p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
-and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
-speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
-that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
-
-<p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
-(at) lists.debian.org.</p>
</description>
</item>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff