+ <item>
+ <title>Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
+perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
+working. One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
+needed to get the hardware on my computer working. Most often this
+affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
+controller or the ethernet card. Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
+including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
+process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
+they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
+debian packages. Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
+info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
+info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
+info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
+info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
+info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
+firmware-ipw2x00
+firmware-ipw2x00
+Preconfiguring packages ...
+Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
+(Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
+Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
+Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
+#
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
+printed instead:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
+info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
+#
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
+me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
+
+<p>So, how does it work? It look at the set of currently loaded
+kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
+the firmware files listed in the module meta-information. Next, it
+download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
+the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
+requested firmware file. If the package is in the non-free section, a
+non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
+<tt>apt-get install</tt>. The end result is a slightly better working
+machine.</p>
+
+<p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
+this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
+finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
+#655507</a>. There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
+firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
+from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The value of a good distro wide test suite...</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 22 Jun 2013 07:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
+which check that services are running, working, and return the
+expected results. It runs automatically just after the first boot on
+test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
+installations (using non-test ISOs). It test that the LDAP service is
+operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
+online resizable, etc, etc. And it check that the PXE service is
+configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
+
+<p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
+Edu Wheezy release. These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
+complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
+happen all the needed packages need to be on them. Thanks to our test
+suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
+cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
+When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
+using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
+working packages to get it working. And the packages changed name
+from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
+debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
+packages during installation. Without our test suite, I suspect we
+would never have discovered this before release. Now it is fixed
+right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
+
+<p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
+administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
+test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
+any errors are detected. This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
+the problem.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
+please join us on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
+irc.debian.org</a> and the
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
+list.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
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