- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a></div>
- <div class="date">27th October 2014</div>
- <div class="body"><p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
-sent out
-<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
-announcement</a>:</p>
-
-<pre>
-The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
-Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
-
-Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
-various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
-and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
-Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
-roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
-hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
-pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
-
-For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
-installation instructions are available, including detailed
-instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
-setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
-for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
-of at least 5 characters!
-
- [1] <URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> >
-
-Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
-tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
-reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
-the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
-Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
-
-Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
-mostly in Germany and Norway.
-
-About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
-===============================
-
-Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
-on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
-configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
-server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
-waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
-Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
-initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
-machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
-provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
-centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
-services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
-packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
-schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
-environment.
-
- [2] <URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> >
- [3] <URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> >
-
-Full release notes and manual
-=============================
-
-Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
-and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
-list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
-the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
-available, see the manual translation overview[5].
-
- [4] <URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> >
- [5] <URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> >
-
-Where to get it
----------------
-
-To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
-
- * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
- * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
- * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
-
-The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
-
-New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
-===============================================================================
-
-
-Installation changes
---------------------
-
- * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
-
-Software updates
-----------------
-
-Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
-
- * Linux kernel 3.16.x
- * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
- LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
- choose one of the others see manual.)
- * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
- * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
- * GOsa 2.7.4
- * LTSP 5.5.4
- * CUPS print system 1.7.5
- * new boot framework: systemd
- * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
- * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
- * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
- * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
- * golearn 0.9
- * tuxpaint 0.9.22
- * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
- * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
- installation.
- * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
- notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
-
- [6] <URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> >
- [7] <URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> >
-
-Fixed bugs
-----------
-
- * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
- DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
- information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
- * and many others.
-
-Documentation and translation updates
--------------------------------------
-
- * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
- Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
- Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
-
-Other changes
--------------
-
- * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
- server takes more time.
- * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
- doesn't work.
-
-Regressions / known problems
-----------------------------
-
- * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
- exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
- and Debian bug #762103).
- * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
- #764594). The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
- * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
- work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
- Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
-
-See the status page[8] for the complete list.
-
- [8] <URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> >
-
-How to report bugs
-------------------
-
-<URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> >
-
-About Debian
-============
-
-The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
-free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
-the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
-volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
-maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
-huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
-operating system.
-
-Contact Information
-For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
-mail to press@debian.org.
-
- [9] <URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> >
-</pre>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- Tags: <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>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a></div>
- <div class="date">23rd October 2014</div>
- <div class="body"><p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
-Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
-the surrounding countries. I had volunteered on behalf of the
-Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
-had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
-a row. There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
-regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
-<a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
-camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
-live.</p>
-
-<p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
-around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
-<a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
-public</a> on the MakerConNordic account. The videos have the license
-NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
-<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
-Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>. Many great
-talks available. Check it out! :)</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><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></div>
- <div class="date">22nd October 2014</div>
- <div class="body"><p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
-alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
-operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
-and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
-and various options for each email address. This take a while for
-every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
-job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
-<a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
-listadmin program</a>. It allow you to check lists for new messages
-to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
-lists I recently took over:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-% time listadmin xiph
-fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
-fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
-
-real 0m1.709s
-user 0m0.232s
-sys 0m0.012s
-%
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
-there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
-currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
-minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
-ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
-less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
-program.</p>
-
-<p>If you install
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
-package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
-with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-username username@example.org
-spamlevel 23
-default discard
-discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
-
-password secret
-adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
-mailman-list@lists.example.com
-
-password hidden
-other-list@otherserver.example.org
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
-learn the details.</p>
-
-<p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
-the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
-generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
-variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
-can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
-initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
-lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
-quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
-email.</p>
-
-<p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
-mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
-process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
-time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
-software.</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&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
-configuration example. Also, I've been told that the
-PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
-sure why.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- 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>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a></div>
- <div class="date">17th October 2014</div>
- <div class="body"><p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
-problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
-And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
-Normally something more is needed. But thanks to
-<a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
-package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
-to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
-
-<p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
-firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
-the kernel modules for the hardware). (It can also install user space
-programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
-of this story.)</p>
-
-<p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
-values are needed. First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
-into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
-in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system. This is done by
-preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
-isenkram-cli package. The package name is next passed to debootstrap
-for installation. With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
-will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
-packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
-isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
-
-<p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
-most firmware unfortunately is non-free. This is done by preseeding
-the apt-mirror-setup step. This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
-hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
-
-<p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
-firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
-apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
-both firmware and user space packages when using this method. It also
-do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later. Installing both
-firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
-want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
-and one for user space programs. The firmware task is enabled by
-default, while the one for user space programs is not. This split is
-implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
-
-<p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
-this recipe work for you. :)</p>
-
-<p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work. First and
-foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
-files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/. So the
-isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find. First there
-is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-Task: isenkram-packages
-Section: hardware
-Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
- Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
- proposed.
-Test-new-install: show show
-Relevance: 8
-Packages: for-current-hardware
-
-Task: isenkram-firmware
-Section: hardware
-Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
- Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
- packages are proposed.
-Test-new-install: mark show
-Relevance: 8
-Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
-should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
-/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/. The scripts use other scripts to get a
-list of packages to install. The for-current-hardware-firmware script
-look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-#!/bin/sh
-#
-PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
-export PATH
-isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
-tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
-
-<p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
-installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
---new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
-install.</p>
-
-<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
-pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
-install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- 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>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-