<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>
<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