- <title>Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
-Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
-globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
-<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
-#debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
-worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
-help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
-with him, to learn more about him.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
-which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
-party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
-friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
-country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
-community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
-began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
-constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
-field.</p>
-
-<p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
-provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
-activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
-of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
-software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
-the only one we have in our country.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
-even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
-it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
-educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
-love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
-technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
-ways to contribute.</p>
-
-<p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
-configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
-haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
-areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
-software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
-one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
-environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
-for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
-from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
-have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
-maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
-took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
-Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
-time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
-with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
-out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
-it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
-
-<p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
-availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
-scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
-only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
-lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
-project.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
-disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
-project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
-a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
-Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
-ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
-lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
-opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
-to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
-
-<p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
-with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
-to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
-on.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
-daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
-am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
-Enlightenment project a lot!),
-<a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
-use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
-<a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
-get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
-stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</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, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
-now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
-that:</p>
+ <title>Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 11 Oct 2013 14:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
+networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
+areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
+can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
+successful examples like
+<a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
+<a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
+(see
+<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
+for a large list</a>) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
+work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
+can be seen from their
+<a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
+updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
+automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
+There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
+and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
+
+<p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
+to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
+href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
+my recent involvement in
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
+finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
+Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
+when possible, given that most communication between people are
+between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
+communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
+any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
+private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
+important over the years.</p>
+
+<p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
+working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
+<a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania. They seem to
+have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
+<a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
+Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
+behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
+<a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>. Unfortunately the wiki
+site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
+reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
+the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
+from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
+came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
+speakers about this talk (from
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
+
+<p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
+
+<p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
+There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
+figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
+given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
+is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
+completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
+batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
+<a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
+is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
+organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
+less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
+that project (from
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
+
+<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
+
+<p>According to the wikipedia page on
+<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
+mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
+packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
+B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
+based community mesh networks.</p>
+
+<p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
+(as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
+network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
+vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
+computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
+least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
+<a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
+introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
+the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
+
+<p><table>
+<tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
+<tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
+<tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
+<td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
+<td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
+</table></p>
+
+<p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
+in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
+VillageTelco about
+"<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
+about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
+for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
+other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
+network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
+any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
+
+<p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
+but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
+firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
+wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
+
+<p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
+us on IRC, either channel
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
+or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
+irc.freenode.net.</p>
+
+<p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
+research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
+and Innovation called
+<a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
+reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
+learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
+Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
+commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
+to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
+know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
+be interested in a cooperation?</p>
+
+<p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
+by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
+batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
+mesh system.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu 7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 8 Oct 2013 17:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
+Salvador had published a
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
+Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
+on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
+services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
+in other word a single user machine). The result is 11 minutes long,
+and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
+Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
+showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
+of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
+other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
+advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
+Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
+computers without hard drives by installing one central
+<a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
+
+<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+
+<p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
+me know. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
+Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team. The
+complete announcement text can be found at
+<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
+section</a>, translated to several languages. Please check it out.</p>
+
+<p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon. One
+can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
+partition is too small. A workaround is to extend the partition (use
+lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2013 14:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
+project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
+vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
+collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>