+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 8th April 2012</div>
+ <div class="body"><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>
+</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html">Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 6th April 2012</div>
+ <div class="body"><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>
+</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/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 5th April 2012</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
+Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
+non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
+for schools. Check out his article
+<a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
+distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
+</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/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a></div>
<div class="date"> 1st April 2012</div>
</div>
<div class="padding"></div>
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a></div>
- <div class="date">19th March 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
-users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
-<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
-Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
-long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
-Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
-author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
-contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
-encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
-years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
-weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
-installations.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
-London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
-just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
-along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
-mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
-well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
-have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
-LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
-these things we decided to try it.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
-from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
-goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
-would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
-low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
-that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
-Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
-proprietary software everywhere.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
-how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
-various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
-English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
-users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
-OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
-desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
-use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
-that counts...)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
-and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
-the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
-applications". However, schools today are experiencing budget
-constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
-XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
-iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
-longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
-realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
-putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
-first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
-
-<p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
-free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
-</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a></div>
- <div class="date">16th March 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
-it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
-translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
-believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
-
-<ol>
-
-<li>The documentation is written in a
-<a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
-<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
-Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
-docbook XML.</li>
-
-<li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
-.pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
-with the translated text.</li>
-
-<li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
-which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
-use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
-the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
-images.</li>
-
-<li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
-XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
-
-<li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
-create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
-
-</ol>
-
-<p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
-issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
-we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained. The docbook
-support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
-make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
-
-<p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
-package</a>.</p>
-</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/NUUG_presentasjon__Skolelinux___ferdig_oppsatt_skolenettl_sning.html">NUUG-presentasjon: Skolelinux - ferdig oppsatt skolenettløsning</a></div>
- <div class="date">13th March 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>I dag presenterte jeg ny versjon av Skolelinux for NUUGs medlemmer.
-<a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/mypapers/20120313-skolelinux-squeeze.html">Lysark</a>
-er tilgjengelige allerede og
-<a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">video-opptak</a>
-kommer så snart videogruppa til NUUG får publisert den. Jeg kom på
-endel punkter om nye ting i Squeeze-utgaven under veis som jeg burde
-hatt med, og har sikkert skrevet noe tull på lysarkene som jeg ennå
-ikke har oppdaget. Denne presentasjonen ble smurt ihop på veldig kort
-tid, og jeg rakk ikke finpusse den. Håper den kan være lærerik
-likevel.</p>
-</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/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
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+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (4)</a></li>
</ul></li>
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+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (97)</a></li>
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+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (22)</a></li>
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