The
-vmdebootstrap
-program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
-create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
-debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
-stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
-Raspberry Pi, as part
-of a plan to simplify the build system for
-the FreedomBox
-project. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
-the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
-based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
-Raspberry Pi.
-
-
Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
-architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
-code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
-Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
-allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
-Debian
-Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi. First, the
---foreign /path/to/binfm_handler option tell vmdebootstrap to
-call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
-generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
-vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
-two new options --bootsize size and --boottype
-fstype to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
-given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
-partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a --variant
-variant option to allow me to create smaller images without the
-Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
---no-extlinux to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
-as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
-most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
-upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
-available from
-the
-upstream project page.
-
-
To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
-create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
-binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
-list:
-
-
-#!/bin/sh
-set -e # Exit on first error
-rootdir="$1"
-cd "$rootdir"
-cat <<EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
-deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
-EOF
-# Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
-# install a kernel somewhere too.
-wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
- -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
-chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
-mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
-touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
-chroot $rootdir rpi-update
-
-
-
Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
-to build the image:
The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
-rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
-exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
-/etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
-set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
-that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
-using a non-free binary blob.
-
-
The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
-probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
-build dependency list.
-
-
The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
-on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
-optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
-than Raspbian based images.
For å ta et lite eksempel: Stortingets nettsted,
-www.stortinget.no (og
-forsåvidt også
-data.stortinget.no),
-inneholder informasjon om det som foregår på Stortinget, og jeg antar
-de største brukerne av informasjonen der er representanter og
-rådgivere på Stortinget. Intet overraskende med det. Det som derimot
-er mer skjult er at Stortingets nettsted bruker
-Google
-Analytics, hvilket gjør at enhver som besøker nettsidene der også
-rapporterer om besøket via Internett-linjer som passerer Sverige,
-England og videre til USA. Det betyr at informasjon om ethvert besøk
-på stortingets nettsider kan snappes opp av svensk, britisk og USAs
-etterretningsvesen. De kan dermed holde et øye med hvilke
-Stortingssaker stortingsrepresentantene synes er interessante å sjekke
-ut, og hvilke sider rådgivere og andre på stortinget synes er
-interessant å besøke, når de gjør det og hvilke andre representanter
-som sjekker de samme sidene omtrent samtidig. Stortingets bruk av
-Google Analytics gjør det dermed enkelt for utenlands etteretning å
-spore representantenes aktivitet og interesse. Hvis noen av
-representantene bruker Google Mail eller noen andre tjenestene som
-krever innlogging, så vil det være enda enklere å finne ut nøyaktig
-hvilke personer som bruker hvilke nettlesere og dermed knytte
-informasjonen opp til enkeltpersoner på Stortinget.
-
-
Og jo flere nettsteder som bruker Google Analytics, jo bedre
-oversikt over stortingsrepresentantenes lesevaner og interesse blir
-tilgjengelig for svensk, britisk og USAs etterretning. Hva de kan
-bruke den informasjonen til overlater jeg til leseren å undres
-over.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
+Norwegian Unix User Group about
+the
+OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net, and was very happy to
+learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
+use when looking for peoples public key. So far I have used
+subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
+were misbehaving, but those days are ended. The servers I have used
+up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable. I hope
+those problems are gone now.
+
+
Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
+sks-keyservers.net service
+there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
+day to ensure they are well connected and up to date. It must be
+better than what I have used so far. :)
+
+
Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
+keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
+not seem to be used in Debian. Perhaps it should?
+
+
Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
+line:
+
+
+keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
+
+
+
With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
+entries in DNS. Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
+user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
+keyserver automatically should their need it:
+
+
+% host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
+_pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
+%
+
+
+
Now if only
+the
+HKP lookup protocol supported finding signature paths, I would be
+very happy. It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
+normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
+another key. Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
+download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
+key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
+This is as far as I can tell not possible today. Perhaps something
+for a future version of the protocol?
The last few days I have been experimenting with
-the
-batman-adv mesh technology. I want to gain some experience to see
-if it will fit the
-Freedombox project, and together with my neighbors try to build a
-mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer 2
-mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
-as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.
-
-
My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
-around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So
-instead, I started playing with a
-Raspberry Pi, and tried to
-get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh
-node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
-the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
-network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
-WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
-non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for
-Android phones using the Serval
-Project voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
-phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android
-phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
-the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if
-they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
-every client on the local network.
-
-
To get this working, I've created a debian package
-meshfx-node
-and a script
-build-rpi-mesh-node
-to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I'm using Debian Jessie (and
-not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
-Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
-image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now. Also, as
-Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
-Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope
-the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
-support.
-
-
To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
-after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:
Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
-wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for
-me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
-ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
-an
-earlier blog post about this mesh testing.
-
-
The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought
-everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online
-from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:
-
-
-
-
Supplier
Model
NOK
-
Teknikkmagasinet
Raspberry Pi model B
349.90
-
Teknikkmagasinet
Raspberry Pi type B case
99.90
-
Lefdal
Jensen Air:Link 25150
295.-
-
Clas Ohlson
Kingston 16 GB SD card
199.-
-
Total cost
943.80
-
-
-
-
Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
-connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
-floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
-play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times
-I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward
-to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
-and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)
Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
+to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
+commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
+create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
+agreement with MPEG LA. If one
+want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
+setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
+format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license. I
+am not sure.
+Back
+then, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
+and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
+program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
+LA. The issue is not limited to those two products, though. Other
+much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
+of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple. The complicating
+factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
+that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
+licenses are.
+
+
These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
+published
+end user
+license
+text (converted to lower case text for easier reading):
+
+
+
18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
+software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:
+
+
This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
+license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
+encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (âMPEG-4
+videoâ) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
+consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
+obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
+video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
+use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
+internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
+LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
+the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
+with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
+and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
+(i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
+title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
+title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
+and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
+LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.
+
+
18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
+software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:
+
+
This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
+the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
+receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
+standard (âAVC videoâ) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
+by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
+a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
+or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
+obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.
+
+
+
Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
+personal or non-commercial purposes.
With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
+Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
+MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
+non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
+with the MPEG-4 visual standard (âMPEG-4 videoâ) and/or (ii) decoding
+MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
+non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
+licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
+shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
+that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
+licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
+http://www.mpegla.com.
+
+
With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
+Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
+MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
+product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
+for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
+that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
+encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
+media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
+which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
+end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
+be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
+additional details.
+
+
+
+
Some free software like
+Handbrake and
+FFMPEG uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
+not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
+requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.
Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
-the Spykee robot
-(with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
-web page. Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
-easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github. If
-you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
-the
-libspykee-perl github repository.
Lenge siden jeg har hatt tid til å publisere lenker til skriverier
+jeg har hatt glede og nytte av av å lese. Her er en liten norsk
+lenkesamling.
+
+
+
+
Sjøslag
+om fiskemilliardene (NRK Ytring 2014-03-03) - litt om hvordan de
+norske felles matressurser røves fra felleskapet.
+
+
Matkrisen
+kan komme til Norge (Aftenposten 2014-4-01) - hvordan miljøendringene vil gjøre matproduksjonen i Norge mer sårbar.
+
+
Norge
+trenger kornlager (NRK Ytring 2014-06-07) Chr. Anton Smedshaug
+forteller litt om Norges sårbare matsituasjon etter at Staten solgte
+Norges kornlager.
+
+
PST
+vil overvåke datatastaturer (NRK 2014-03-04) - PST ønsker retten
+til å bryte seg inn på private PC-er og legge inn spionprogrammer.
+Hvilket nok vil gjøre Linux mer populært, men gjør at en i enda mindre
+grad enn i dag kan stole på datamaskiner - neppe en god ide for
+samfunnet totalt sett.
Svarte
+ikke på kritikken (Dagbladet 2014-03-06) - innlegg fra Norsk
+presseforbund der de nok en gang tar opp det forkastelige i at
+politiet nå har full tilgang til å bedrive telefonkontroll av
+advokater.
I
+seng med fienden (Aftenposten 2014-03-10) - kronikk fra Eirik
+H. Vinje om hvordan menn og kvinner settes opp mot hverandre i det
+offentlige ordskiftet, kanskje på sviktende grunnlag.
+
+
Fritt
+frem for skulk (Aftenposten 2014-03-14) - skildring av hvordan
+norske elever i dag ikke lenger har rimelig krav om oppmøte på
+skolen.
Konsentrasjonssvikt
+på pensum (Dagbladet 2014-03-14) - Kommentar om hvordan (feil)
+bruk IKT i skolen kan ødelegge mer enn det bidrar til læring.
+
+
Reservasjonsrettsstaten
+(blogg fra Doremus 2014-02-09) - morsom beskrivelse om hvordan
+regjeringens forslag til reservasjonsrett for leger kan utvides til å
+gjelde alles samvittighet.
+
+
Autoritær
+gjøkunge (Aftenposten 2014-03-25) - Kronikk av Bjørn Stærk om
+snurpenots-overvåkningen som varsleren Snowden dokumenterte.
Norge
+må stanse avlyttingen (Dagbladet 2014-03-26) - leserinnlegg fra
+Felix Horne der han ber om at Norge gjør en innsats for å få slutt på
+overvåkning av innbyggerne som gjøres i Norge av Etiopiske
+myndigheter.
+
+
Demokrati
+er ingen naturlig styreform (Aftenposten 2014-04-01) - kronikk av
+Stein Ringen om hvordan demokrati som styreform går tapt når
+innbyggerne tar det for gitt.
+
+
Ytringsansvar
+ere Enhver tilladte! (NRK Ytring 2014-04-01) - innspill fra Trygve
+Svensson og Helge Svare om at hver enkelt av oss har et ansvar for å
+ytre oss i den offentlige debatten.
+
+
Jeg
+er ingen god samfunnsborger (Aftenposten 2014-04-16), kronikk av
+Simen Tveitereid om alternative måter å motiveres i samfunnet, uten å
+hige etter mer penger og flere ting.
Datalagringsdirektivets
+endelikt (blogg fra John Wessel-Aas 2014-04-11) - oppsummering
+av hvordan direktivet ble funnet ugyldig i EU-domstolen.
+
+
Kronikk:
+Kapitulasjonspresidenten (VG 2014-04-22) - kronikk av Einar
+Kr. Steffenak om hvordan Stortingspresidenten og regjeringen viser sin
+prinsippløshet i møte med Kina.
+
+
Innerst
+inne er alle nordmenn (Aftenposten 2014-04-27) - kronikk fra Bjørn
+Stærk om hvordan vi i Vesten i stor grad baserer oss på en fantasi om
+at alle i verden bærer på en drøm om å bli som oss.
Et
+forsvar for bråkmakerne (Dagbladet 2014-05-30) - kronikk av Dag
+Ãystein Nome som beskriver hvordan dagens skole ikke fungerer sÃ¥ godt
+for mange elever.
+
+
Betalte
+med slitt seddel - havnet i arresten (Osloby 2014-06-25)) -
+dokumentasjon av Oslopolitiets angrep på vår alles rett til å ferdes
+uten elektronisk sporing. Jeg bruker kontanter i så stor grad som
+mulig da banken ikke har noe med hvor jeg er og hva jeg kjøper. Vi
+som gjør dette risikerer som beskrevet overgrep som frihetsberøvelse
+og registrering og lagring av fingeravtrykk og bilde i politiets
+database over mistenkte.
+
+
Fredsprisen
+til Snowden (Aftenposten 2014-06-28) - leder som forklarer hvorfor
+varsleren Snowden bør få fredsprisen.
+
+
Strategi
+for politistaten (Dagbladet 2014-08-01) - leder som advarer om
+sterke krefter som bruker terrortrusselen til å lirke Norge nærmere å
+bli en politistat.
+
+
Vi
+må tenke nytt om narkotika (NRK Ytring 2014-08-03) - Mark Lewis
+forklarer hvorfor legalisering og offentlig kontroll av
+narkotikamarkedet er mye bedre enn å overlate det til kriminelle.
The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
-wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of
-these. :)
-
-
Via Debian
-Project News for 2013-10-14 I came across the Outreach Program for
-Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
-more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered
-to match any donation done to Debian
-earmarked for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and
-hope you will to. :)
-
-
And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
-create video
-documentaries about the excessive spying on every Internet user that
-take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already
-donated. Are you next?
-
-
For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
-Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
-statement under the heading
-Bloggers United for Open
-Access for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
-Norwegian government. So far 499 signatures. I hope you will sign it
-too.
The complete and free âout of the boxâ software solution for
+schools, Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
+involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
+from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
+the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.
+
+
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
+
+
My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
+employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
+haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to
+support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
+administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
+Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
+Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
+works with Windows . :-(
+
+
In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
+Windows 98, 2000, XP, â¦, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
+Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
+children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
+psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
+work with the documentations of our patients.
+
+
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?
+
+
Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
+his school (Gymnasium
+Harsewinkel). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
+were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
+software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
+computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
+with this job.
+
+
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?
+
+
The independence.
+
+
First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
+software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
+included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.
+
+
Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
+possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
+servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
+working reliable.
+
+
We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
+workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
+solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
+terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
+workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
+machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
+router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
+dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.
+
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?
+
+
Teachers and pupils are Windows users. <Irony on> And Linux
+isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. <Irony
+off> They don't realize the stability of the system.
+
+
Which free software do you use daily?
+
+
Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
+Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, ⦠and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)
+
+
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
+
+
In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
+which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
+teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
+Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
+Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
+instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
+develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.
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
-Freifunk and
-Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
-(see
-wikipedia
-for a large list) 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
-dynamically
-updated node graph and map, 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.
-
-
I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
-to do it as part of my involvement with the NUUG member organisation community, and
-my recent involvement in
-the Freedombox project
-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.
-
-
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
-Hackeriet at Husmania. They seem to
-have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
-the Oslo
-Freifunk project, but that effort is now dead and the people
-behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
-meshfx. 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
-youtube):
-
-
-
-
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
-Serval project in Australia
-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
-youtube):
-
-
-
-
According to the wikipedia page on
-Wireless
-mesh network 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.
-
-
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
-good
-introduction is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
-the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
-
-
-
Setting
Value
-
Protocol / kernel module
batman-adv
-
ESSID
meshfx@hackeriet
-
Channel / Frequency
11 / 2462
-
Cell ID
02:BA:00:00:00:01
-
-
-
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
-"Information
-about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
-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. :)
-
-
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.
-
-
If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
-us on IRC, either channel
-#oslohackerspace
-or #nuug on
-irc.freenode.net.
-
-
While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
-research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
-and Innovation called
-The
-reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks 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?
-
-
Update 2013-10-12: I was just
-told
-by the Serval project developers that they no longer use
-batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
-mesh system.
This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
+docbook version of the 2004 book
+Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig,
+to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
+law. Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text. There
+are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
+need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
+translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
+reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
+need to be cleaned up. The work stopped up because I had to give
+priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
+the translation show this very well:
+
+
+
+
If you want to read the result, check out the
+github
+project pages and the
+PDF,
+EPUB
+and HTML version available in the
+archive
+directory.
+
+
Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
+you find any.
The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
-Salvador had published a
-video on
-Youtube 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 Zygote Body 3D model
-of the human body, 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
-LTSP server.
-
-
Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:
-
-
-
-
Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
-me know. :)
The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+project provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
+administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
+and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the
+text processing of this manual is handled in the project.
+
+
One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
+language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
+But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
+information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
+in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
+documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
+contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
+edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be
+easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
+help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
+tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
+goals.
+
+
We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
+Debian
+wiki, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one
+front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
+for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
+chapters together into one large web page (aka
+the
+AllInOne page). The AllInOne page is the one used for further
+processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the
+MoinMoin installation on
+wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
+the Docbook format, we can fetch
+the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
+page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
+manual. This process also download images and transform image
+references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated
+Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
+using the documentation/scripts/get_manual program, and the
+result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
+a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
+and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of
+our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
+epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
+are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.
+
+
But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated
+documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
+track the English original. For this we use the
+poxml package,
+which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
+translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
+translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot
+file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
+files), which the translations update with the native language
+translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
+original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
+and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
+create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
+debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly
+translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
+then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
+of the documentation.
+
+
The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We
+recommend using
+lokalize,
+while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
+Poodle or
+Transifex. All we care about
+is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated
+translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
+bug reports
+against the debian-edu-doc package.
+
+
One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
+they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
+formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
+this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the
+needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
+translated images by storing translated versions in
+images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The
+package maintainers know more.
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
-the Debian News
-section, translated to several languages. Please check it out.
-
-
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).
Jeg har fortsatt behov for å kunne laste ned innslag fra NRKs
+nettsted av og til for å se senere når jeg ikke er på nett, men
+min
+oppskrift fra 2011 sluttet å fungere da NRK byttet
+avspillermetode. I dag fikk jeg endelig lett etter oppdatert løsning,
+og jeg er veldig glad for å fortelle at den enkleste måten å laste ned
+innslag er å bruke siste versjon 2014.06.07 av
+youtube-dl. Støtten i
+youtube-dl kom
+inn for 23 dager siden og
+versjonen i
+Debian fungerer fint også som backport til Debian Wheezy. Det er
+et lite problem, det håndterer kun URLer med små bokstaver, men hvis
+en har en URL med store bokstaver kan en bare gjøre alle store om til
+små bokstaver for å få youtube-dl til å laste ned. Rapporterte
+nettopp
+problemet til
+utviklerne, og antar de får fikset det snart.
Takk til gode venner på foreningen NUUGs IRC-kanal
+#nuug på irc.freenode.net
+for tipsene som fikk meg i mål.
+
+
Oppdatering 2014-06-17: Etter at jeg publiserte
+denne, ble jeg tipset om bloggposten
+"Downloading
+HD content from tv.nrk.no" av Ingvar Hagelund, som har alternativ
+implementasjon og tips for å lage mkv-fil med undertekstene inkludert.
+Kanskje den passer bedre for deg? I tillegg ble feilen i youtube-dl
+ble fikset litt senere ut på dagen i går, samt at youtube-dl fikk
+støtte for å laste ned undertitler. Takk til Anders Einar Hilden for
+god innsats og youtube-dl-utviklerne for rask respons.
The Freedombox
-project 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.
Dear lazyweb. I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
+in my car, connected to
+a
+small screen next to the rear mirror. I plan to hook it up with a
+GPS and a USB wifi card too. The idea is to get my own
+"Carputer". But I
+wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
+such car computer.
Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
+ fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
+ or make a sound). This could be done either using either data from
+ Openstreetmap or OCR
+ info gathered from a dashboard camera.
Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
+ to home server. Try IP over DNS
+ (iodine) or ICMP
+ (Hans) if direct
+ connection do not work.
On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
-Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
-Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
-a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
-The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
-pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
-metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
-us on IRC
-(#freedombox on irc.debian.org) and
-the
-mailing list if you want to help make this vision come true.
+
If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
+some or all of these features, please let me know.
The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
-today. This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:
-
-
-
Hi,
-
-
it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
-short) of Debian Edu /
-Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy!
-
-
Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
-we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
-weekend. We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
-if you find something, please notify us immediately!
-
-
(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
-another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)
-
-
Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
-compared to beta1:
-
-
-
-
The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
-also gets Chromium to use this proxy.
-
Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
-understand ical/dav sources.
-
Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
-main server.
-
A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e
-
-
The Source DVD image has the filename
-debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
-089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
-as the other isos.
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, 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 and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
-can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.
-
-
This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
-this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
-Squeeze release.
-
-
Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases
-
-
Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
-versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
-release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
-deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
-gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
-Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
-password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
-(backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
-to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
-directory.
I've been following the Gnash
+project for quite a while now. It is a free software
+implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
+plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
+newer AVM2 format - see
+Lightspark for that one),
+allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly
+developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
+Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
+those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
+support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark
+and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
+so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately,
+Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
+sites do not work yet.
+
+
A few months ago, I started looking at
+Coverity, the static source
+checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
+to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
+company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
+the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock
+errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even
+extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
+There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
+amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
+code checkers I have tested over the years.
+
+
Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
+developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy
+today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
+detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that
+the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
+the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the
+test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.
It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
+related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
+So I implemented one, using
+my Isenkram
+package. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
+run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option,
+"Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)". When you
+select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
+the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.
+
+
The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
+description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
+packages to install. The first part is in
+/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc and look like
+this:
+
+
+Task: isenkram
+Section: hardware
+Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
+ Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
+ proposed.
+Test-new-install: mark show
+Relevance: 8
+Packages: for-current-hardware
+
+
+
The second part is in
+/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware and look like
+this:
All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
+trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
+have installed on our machines. I've not been able to find a way to
+get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
+before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful,
+check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.
+
+
The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
+fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
+/usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
+database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database
+parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
+#719837 and
+#730704). The cause is in
+the python-apt code (bug
+#745487), but using a
+workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
+reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
+around 2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop
+daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
+unstable today.
+
+
I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
+Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
+use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper
+AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
+DEP-11, and
+GSoC
+project will take place this summer to improve the situation. I
+look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
+start using the information when it is ready.
+
+
If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
+add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
+the pymissile
+package or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
+package. See also
+all my
+blog posts tagged isenkram for details on the notation. I expect
+the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
+moment I got no better place to store it.
