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14 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
21 <h3>Entries tagged "debian".
</h3>
25 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software
</a>
31 <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
32 solution for use at home. My requirements are simple, it must be
33 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
34 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
35 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
36 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
37 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
38 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space. On top
39 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
40 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage. But
41 I never found time to implement such system. But the last few weeks I
42 have looked at a system called
43 <a href=
"https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL
</a>, a locally
44 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.
</p>
46 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
47 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
48 Google Drive or OpenStack API. There are heaps of such storage
49 providers. S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
50 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server. S3QL
51 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
52 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
53 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
54 while the content is stored in the cloud as well. This allow me to
55 have a backup that should survive fire. The file system can not be
56 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
57 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
58 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.
</p>
60 <p>It is simple to use. I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
61 package is included already. So to get started, run
<tt>apt-get
62 install s3ql
</tt>. Next, pick a storage provider. I ended up picking
63 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
64 <a href=
"https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
65 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service
</a>, because I trust the laws
66 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
67 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
68 in Iceland. Another nice recipe is available from the article
69 <a href=
"http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
70 Filesystem for HPC Storage
</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
71 Admin magazine. When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
72 the API key needed to connect to the storage API. With Greencloud,
73 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
76 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
77 system. First, create a new bucket in the cloud. This bucket is the
78 file system storage area. I picked a bucket name reflecting the
79 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
80 I'll refer to it as
<tt>bucket-name
</tt> below. In addition, one need
81 the API login and password, and a locally created password. Store it
82 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
86 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
87 backend-login: API-login
88 backend-password: API-password
89 fs-passphrase: local-password
90 </pre></blockquote></p>
92 <p>I create my local passphrase using
<tt>pwget
50</tt> or similar,
93 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
94 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
95 details and password to create it:
</p>
98 # mkdir -m
700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
99 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
100 --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
102 Enter backend password:
103 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
104 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
105 Enter encryption password:
106 Confirm encryption password:
107 Generating random encryption key...
108 Creating metadata tables...
118 Compressing and uploading metadata...
119 Wrote
0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
120 #
</pre></blockquote></p>
122 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
125 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
126 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name /s3ql
127 Using
4 upload threads.
128 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
138 Mounting filesystem...
140 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
141 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
1.0T
0 1.0T
0% /s3ql
143 </pre></blockquote></p>
145 <p>The file system is now ready for use. I use rsync to store my
146 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
147 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
148 running rsync. To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
149 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
150 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
155 </pre></blockquote></p>
157 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
158 correct any problems detected. This can be used if the local server
159 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
160 mounted" flag. This is what it look like when processing a working
164 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
165 Using cached metadata.
166 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
167 Checking DB integrity...
168 Creating temporary extra indices...
169 Checking lost+found...
170 Checking cached objects...
171 Checking names (refcounts)...
172 Checking contents (names)...
173 Checking contents (inodes)...
174 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
175 Checking objects (reference counts)...
176 Checking objects (backend)...
177 ..processed
5000 objects so far..
178 ..processed
10000 objects so far..
179 ..processed
15000 objects so far..
180 Checking objects (sizes)...
181 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
182 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
183 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
184 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
185 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
186 Checking inodes (sizes)...
187 Checking extended attributes (names)...
188 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
189 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
190 Checking directory reachability...
191 Checking unix conventions...
192 Checking referential integrity...
193 Dropping temporary indices...
194 Backing up old metadata...
204 Compressing and uploading metadata...
205 Wrote
0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
207 </pre></blockquote></p>
209 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
210 quick, about the same speed as local file access. Uploading large
211 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
212 house. Uploading
685 MiB with a
100 MiB cache gave me
305 kiB/s,
213 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
214 Debian installation ISO gave me
610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
215 Both were measured using
<tt>dd
</tt>. So for me, the bottleneck is my
216 network, not the file system code. I do not know what a good cache
217 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
220 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
221 time. If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
225 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
226 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name /s3ql
227 Using
8 upload threads.
228 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
230 </pre></blockquote></p>
232 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
233 metadata is uploaded once every
24 hour by default. To ensure the
234 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
235 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
239 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
240 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
242 </pre></blockquote></p>
244 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
245 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
246 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
251 Directory entries:
9141
254 Total data size:
22049.38 MB
255 After de-duplication:
21955.46 MB (
99.57% of total)
256 After compression:
21877.28 MB (
99.22% of total,
99.64% of de-duplicated)
257 Database size:
2.39 MB (uncompressed)
258 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
260 </pre></blockquote></p>
262 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
263 storage. I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
264 <a href=
"https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud
</a>,
265 <a href=
"http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive
</a>,
266 <a href=
"http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces
</a>,
267 <a href=
"http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace
</a> and
268 <a href=
"http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud
</A>. The latter even
269 accept payment in Bitcoin. Pick one that suit your need. Some of
270 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
271 quire different and you will have to figure out what suit you
274 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
275 and posters discussing the S3QL file system. There are several, which
276 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
277 science community and increased my confidence in using it. One nice
279 "
<a href=
"http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
280 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
281 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach
</a>" by Hsing-Bung
282 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
283 and Pamela Smith. Please have a look.</p>
285 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
286 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
287 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
288 it come to locking and umask handling etc). Running
289 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
">my
290 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
291 no error was found. So the file system can be used for home
292 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
294 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
295 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
296 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/
">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
297 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client. It have
298 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
299 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
300 only read from it.</p>
302 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
303 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
304 <b><a href="bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
310 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/personvern
">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet
">sikkerhet</a>.
315 <div class="padding
"></div>
319 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html
">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
325 <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
326 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
327 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
328 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
329 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been
330 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
333 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
334 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
335 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
336 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
337 file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
338 where most of the needed packages used are already present. Only one,
339 the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try to build your own
340 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
342 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap
</a>
343 with a user with sudo access to become root:
346 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
348 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
349 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
351 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
354 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
355 devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
356 want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to
<a
357 href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
358 vmdebootstrap
</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
361 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
362 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
363 the preseed values:
</p>
366 url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
</a>
369 <p>But note that due to
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
370 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie
</a>, the installer will
371 currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the
372 '
<tt>apt-cdrom ident
</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
373 installation will get the installation going. This affect all
374 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.
</p>
376 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
377 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
378 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
379 irc.debian.org)
</a> and
380 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
381 mailing list
</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p>
387 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/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
392 <div class=
"padding"></div>
396 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release
1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)
</a>
402 <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
403 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
404 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a>. I called the project
405 ng-utils, and it has served me well. I placed the project under the
406 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer
</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
407 repository. But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
408 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
409 proper home since then.
</p>
411 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
412 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
413 a proper source control system. I applied for a project on
414 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth
</a>, but did not have time
415 to follow up on it. Until today. :)
</p>
417 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
418 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
419 history of the project. I published all release tarballs and imported
420 them into the git repository. As the project is really stable and not
421 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
422 release and call it
1.0. Visit the new project home on
423 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/
</a>
424 if you want to check it out. The new version is also uploaded into
425 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable
</a>.
</p>
431 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>.
436 <div class=
"padding"></div>
440 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd
</a>
446 <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
447 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
448 boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the
449 <a href=
"https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
450 Google Summer of Code work
</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
451 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started,
452 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
453 <a href=
"http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz
</a>,
454 and started it using virt-manager.
</p>
456 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
457 password) was to get the network operational. I followed
458 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
459 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page
</a> and ran these
460 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
461 kvm internal DHCP server:
</p>
464 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
465 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $
2}')
466 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $
2}')
468 </pre></blockquote></p>
470 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
471 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
472 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.
</p>
474 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
475 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
476 set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
477 compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client
480 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
484 cat
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list
<<EOF
485 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
489 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
490 sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
491 update-alternatives --config runsystem
492 </pre></blockquote></p>
494 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
495 <tt>reboot-hurd
</tt> instead of just
<tt>reboot
</tt>, as there is not
496 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
497 'reboot' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
498 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
499 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
500 start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no
501 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
504 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
505 fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
506 figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
507 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce
508 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
509 adding this repository to the machine:
</p>
512 cat
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list
<<EOF
513 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
515 </pre></blockquote></p>
517 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
518 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
519 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
520 BTS. This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:
</p>
523 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
524 i emacs - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
526 i hurd-recommended - Miscellaneous translators
527 i isc-dhcp-client - ISC DHCP client
528 i isc-dhcp-common - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
529 i libc-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
530 i libc-dev-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
531 i libc0.3 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
532 i A libc0.3-dbg - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
533 i libc0.3-dev - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
534 i multiarch-support - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
535 i A x11-common - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
536 i xorg - X.Org X Window System
537 i A xserver-xorg - X.Org X server
538 i A xserver-xorg-input-all - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
540 </pre></blockquote></p>
542 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
543 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
544 the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the
545 command line stuff.
<p>
551 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
556 <div class=
"padding"></div>
560 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release
0.16</a>
566 <p><a href=
"http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity
</a> is a nice tool to
567 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
568 analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
569 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
570 the source. The company behind it provide
571 <a href=
"https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
572 a community service
</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
573 already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
574 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
575 <a href=
"http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash
</a> and
576 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool
</a>
577 projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are
578 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
579 check, and decided to
<a href=
"http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
580 checking of the chrpath project
</a>. It was
581 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of
582 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
583 error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
584 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
585 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
586 the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added
587 <a href=
"https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
588 mailing list for the chrpath developers
</a>, I decided it was time to
589 publish a new release. These are the release notes:
</p>
591 <p>New in
0.16 released
2014-
01-
14:
</p>
595 <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.
</li>
596 <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.
</li>
597 <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.
</li>
602 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
603 new version
0.16 from alioth
</a>. Please let us know via the Alioth
604 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
605 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
606 include a test suite check.
</p>
612 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
617 <div class=
"padding"></div>
621 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release
0.15</a>
627 <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
628 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
629 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
630 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
631 compiled ELF programs. The update was triggered by the persistence of
632 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
633 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc
64-bit Little Endian) he
634 is working on. I checked the
635 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian
</a>,
636 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu
</a> and
637 <a href=
"https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora
</a>
638 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
639 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
640 These are the release notes:
</p>
642 <p>New in
0.15 released
2013-
11-
24:
</p>
646 <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
647 with newer architectures. Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
650 <li>Updated README with current URLs.
</li>
652 <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
655 <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
656 Petr Machata found in Fedora.
</li>
658 <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
659 .dynamic is a NULL terminated string. Based on patch found in
660 Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.
</li>
665 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
666 new version
0.15 from alioth
</a>. Please let us know via the Alioth
667 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
668 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
669 include a testsuite check.
</p>
675 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
680 <div class=
"padding"></div>
684 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog
</a>
690 <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
691 <a href=
"http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
692 init.d scripts
</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
693 init.d scripts at all. Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
694 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:
</p>
697 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
700 # Required-Start: $remote_fs $time
701 # Required-Stop: umountnfs $time
702 # X-Stop-After: sendsigs
703 # Default-Start:
2 3 4 5
704 # Default-Stop:
0 1 6
705 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
706 # Description: Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
707 # It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
708 # used as a drop-in replacement.
710 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
711 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
714 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
715 script was
137 lines, and the above is just
15 lines, most of it meta
718 <p>How to do this, you ask? Well, one create a new script
719 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
724 # Define LSB log_* functions.
725 # Depend on lsb-base (
>=
3.2-
14) to ensure that this file is present
726 # and status_of_proc is working.
727 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
730 # Function that starts the daemon/service
736 #
0 if daemon has been started
737 #
1 if daemon was already running
738 #
2 if daemon could not be started
739 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test
> /dev/null \
741 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
744 # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
745 # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
746 # on this one. As a last resort, sleep for some time.
750 # Function that stops the daemon/service
755 #
0 if daemon has been stopped
756 #
1 if daemon was already stopped
757 #
2 if daemon could not be stopped
758 # other if a failure occurred
759 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/
30/KILL/
5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
761 [ "$RETVAL" =
2 ] && return
2
762 # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
763 # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
764 # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
765 # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
766 # needed by services started subsequently. A last resort is to
767 # sleep for some time.
768 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=
0/
30/KILL/
5 --exec $DAEMON
769 [ "$?" =
2 ] && return
2
770 # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
776 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
780 # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
781 # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
782 # then implement that here.
784 start-stop-daemon --stop --signal
1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
789 scriptbasename="$(basename $
1)"
790 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
791 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
799 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
800 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
802 # Exit if the package is not installed
803 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit
0
805 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
806 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
808 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
813 [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
816 0|
1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg
0 ;;
817 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg
1 ;;
821 [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
824 0|
1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg
0 ;;
825 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg
1 ;;
829 status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit
0 || exit $?
831 #reload|force-reload)
833 # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
834 # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
836 #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
840 restart|force-reload)
842 # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
843 # 'force-reload' alias
845 log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
852 1) log_end_msg
1 ;; # Old process is still running
853 *) log_end_msg
1 ;; # Failed to start
863 echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}"
>&
2
871 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
872 lot. I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
873 work out of the box, but you get the idea. I did not try very hard to
874 optimize it nor make it more robust either.
</p>
876 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
877 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
878 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
879 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially. The boot
880 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.
</p>
886 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
891 <div class=
"padding"></div>
895 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian
</a>
901 <p><a href=
"http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol
</a> for
902 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
903 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
904 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
905 missing in Debian. The
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
906 for a package
</a> was from
2012-
04-
10 with no progress since
907 2013-
04-
01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
908 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
909 repository to get a package I could use. I would very much like
910 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
911 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
912 NEW. I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.
</p>
914 <p>The source is now available from
915 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary
</a>.
</p>
921 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>.
926 <div class=
"padding"></div>
930 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images
</a>
937 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap
</a>
938 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
939 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
940 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
941 stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
942 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi
</a>, as part
943 of a plan to simplify the build system for
944 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
945 project
</a>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
946 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
947 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
950 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
951 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
952 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
953 Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
954 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
955 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
956 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi
</a>. First, the
957 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler
</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
958 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
959 generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
960 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
961 two new options
<tt>--bootsize size
</tt> and
<tt>--boottype
962 fstype
</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
963 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
964 partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a
<tt>--variant
965 variant
</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
966 Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
967 <tt>--no-extlinux
</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
968 as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
969 most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
970 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
972 <a href=
"http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
973 upstream project page
</a>.
</p>
975 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
976 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
977 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
982 set -e # Exit on first error
985 cat
<<EOF
> etc/apt/sources.list
986 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
988 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
989 # install a kernel somewhere too.
990 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
991 -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
992 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
993 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
994 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
995 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
998 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
999 to build the image:
</p>
1002 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
1005 --distribution jessie \
1006 --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
1015 --root-password raspberry \
1016 --hostname raspberrypi \
1017 --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
1018 --customize `pwd`/customize \
1020 --package git-core \
1021 --package binutils \
1022 --package ca-certificates \
1027 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
1028 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
1029 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
1030 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
1031 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
1032 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
1033 using a non-free binary blob.
</p>
1035 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
1036 probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
1037 build dependency list.
</p>
1039 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
1040 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
1041 optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
1042 than
<a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian
</a> based images.
</p>
1048 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/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network
</a>.
1053 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1057 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway
</a>
1063 <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
1064 wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of
1067 <p>Via
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
1068 Project News for
2013-
10-
14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
1069 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
1070 more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered
1071 to match
<a href=
"http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
1072 earmarked
</a> for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and
1073 hope you will to. :)
</p>
1075 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
1076 create
<a href=
"https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
1077 documentaries about the excessive spying
</a> on every Internet user that
1078 take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already
1079 donated. Are you next?
</p>
1081 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
1082 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
1083 statement under the heading
1084 <a href=
"http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
1085 Access
</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
1086 Norwegian government. So far
499 signatures. I hope you will sign it
1093 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/opphavsrett">opphavsrett
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance
</a>.
1098 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1102 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning
</a>
1108 <p>The
<a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
1109 project
</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
1110 vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
1111 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.
</p>
1115 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
1116 2,
5 minute marketing film
</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1118 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
1119 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news
2011</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1121 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
1122 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
1123 Web
2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting
2010</a>
1126 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem
2011
1127 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox
</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1129 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
1130 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz
2011</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1132 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
1133 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
1134 York City in
2012</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1136 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
1137 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in
2012</a>
1140 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
1141 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat,
2012</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1143 <li><a href=
"https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
1144 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem
2013</a> (FOSDEM)
</li>
1146 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
1147 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
1148 2013</a> (Youtube)
</li>
1152 <p>A larger list is available from
1153 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
1154 Freedombox Wiki
</a>.
</p>
1156 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
1157 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
1158 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
1159 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
1160 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
1161 pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
1162 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
1163 us on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
1164 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)
</a> and
1165 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
1166 mailing list
</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p>
1172 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/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
1177 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1181 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi
</a>
1187 <p>I was introduced to the
1188 <a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project
</a>
1189 in
2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
1190 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
1191 within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
1192 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
1193 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
1194 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
1195 control over their own basic infrastructure.
</p>
1197 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
1198 taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
1199 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
1200 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
1201 actually started working on the project a while back.
</p>
1203 <p>The
<a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
1204 Debian initiative
</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
1205 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
1206 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
1207 communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
1208 <a href=
"http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug
</a>,
1209 which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
1210 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
1211 it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
1212 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker
</a>
1213 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
1214 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
1215 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
1216 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
1217 missing in Debian).
</p>
1219 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
1221 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup
</a>),
1222 and a administrative web interface
1223 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth
</a> + exmachina +
1224 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
1225 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy
</a>
1226 (freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
1227 client (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat
</a>)
1228 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
1229 (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd
</a>). The
1230 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
1231 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
1232 this is really working yet, see
1233 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
1234 project TODO
</a> for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
1235 on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
1236 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
1237 users. I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
1238 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
1239 with lots of half baked features.
</p>
1241 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
1242 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
1245 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64
</strong></p>
1249 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
</li>
1250 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.
</li>
1251 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
1252 to the Debian installer:
<p>
1253 <pre>url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
</a></pre></li>
1255 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
1258 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
1259 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.
</li>
1263 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian
</strong></p>
1267 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.
</li>
1268 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.
</li>
1269 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:
</p>
1271 deb
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox
</a> wheezy main
1273 <li><p>Run this as root:
</p>
1275 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
1278 apt-get install freedombox-setup
1279 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
1281 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.
</li>
1285 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
1286 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
1287 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
1288 in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
1289 short "
<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy
</tt>" away. :)</p>
1291 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
1292 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
1293 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
1294 disable
</tt>" as root.</p>
1296 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
1297 problems. We gather on the IRC channel
1298 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">#freedombox</a> on
1299 irc.debian.org and the
1300 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">project
1301 mailing list</a>.</p>
1303 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
1304 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
1305 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
1306 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
1307 to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is 'admin' and the
1308 default password is 'secret'.</p>
1314 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/freedombox
">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet
">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance
">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web
">web</a>.
1319 <div class="padding
"></div>
1323 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html
">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
1329 <p>Earlier, I reported about
1330 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
">my
1331 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>. Friday I was
1332 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away. And as
1333 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
1334 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
1335 currently on the disk.</p>
1337 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
1338 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=
3472&DwnldID=
18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+
520+Series+(
180GB%
2c+
2.5in+SATA+
6Gb%
2fs%
2c+
25nm%
2c+MLC)&lang=eng
">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
1339 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
1340 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
1341 disks. I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
1342 booted the ISO from a USB stick. The disk was recognized, but the
1343 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
1344 to insert any Intel firmware. So no change, and the disk is still
1345 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
1346 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware. No idea how likely
1347 that is. Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness. I
1348 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
1349 the broken disks.</p>
1355 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>.
1360 <div class="padding
"></div>
1364 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
1370 <p>Today I switched to
1371 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
">my
1372 new laptop</a>. I've previously written about the problems I had with
1373 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
1374 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html
">180
1375 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
1376 sustained writes. My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
1377 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
1378 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
1379 disk instead to fix it once and for all. The Samsung disk survived
1380 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
1381 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
1382 decided to trust it with my data. I have installed it as a Debian Edu
1383 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
1384 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
1385 station from now on.</p>
1387 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
1388 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
1389 performance and increase life time of the disk. The Linux kernel and
1390 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
1391 environment. To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
1392 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning. The
1393 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git
">source
1394 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
1395 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
1396 package. If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
1397 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
1398 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
1400 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
1401 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD. It is adjusted to my use case,
1402 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
1403 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
1404 top of this again. See the README file in the package source for the
1405 references I used to pick the settings. At the moment these
1406 parameters are tuned:</p>
1410 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
1411 (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
1413 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
1414 this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
1415 0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
1417 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
1420 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
1423 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
1425 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
1428 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
1429 to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
1433 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
1434 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
1435 little gain. My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
1436 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
1437 computer. I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
1438 from getting the data on the disk (see
1439 <a href="http://xkcd.com/
538/
">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
1440 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
1441 right thing to do.</p>
1443 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
1444 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
1445 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
1447 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
1448 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
1449 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
1450 instead of during my work.</p>
1452 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
1453 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
1455 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning. I expect
1456 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
1457 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
1459 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
1462 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
1463 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
1464 disk. It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
1465 the Lenovo firmware. But I have not tried and did not want to do so
1466 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
1467 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
1474 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>.
1479 <div class="padding
"></div>
1483 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html
">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
1489 <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
1490 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
">the
1491 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
1492 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
1493 sustained write. My supplier is in contact with
1494 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/
">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
1495 replacement disk to try to fix the problem. They decided to send an
1496 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
1498 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
1499 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it. The new disk have the
1500 same firmware version as the original. This time my hope raised
1501 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
1502 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
1503 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%. But around 60%, the disk
1504 died again and I was back on square one. I still do not have a new
1505 laptop with a disk I can trust. I can not live with a disk that might
1506 lock up when I download a new
1507 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
1508 other large files. I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
1509 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
1511 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
1512 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
1513 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
1514 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
1515 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD
180G
5V
1A, ASM P/N
0C38732, FRU
1516 P/N
45N8295, P0C38732.
</p>
1518 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB,
1519 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-
302, FW:
1520 LF1i,
22APR2013, PBA: G39779-
300, LBA
351,
651,
888, LI P/N:
0C38722,
1521 Pb-free
2LI, LC P/N:
16-
200366, WWN:
55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
1522 SSDSC2BW180A3L
2.5"
6Gb/s SATA SSD
180G
5V
1A, ASM P/N
0C38732, FRU
1523 P/N
45N8295, P0C38732.
</p>
1525 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
1526 SA, date and WNPP values. Mentioning all the details here in case
1527 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
1528 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
1535 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>.
1540 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1544 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July
13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo
</a>
1550 <p>The upcoming Saturday,
2013-
07-
13, we are organising a combined
1551 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
1552 party in Oslo. It is organised by
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/">the
1553 member assosiation NUUG
</a> and
1554 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1555 project
</a> together with
<a href=
"http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
1558 <p>It starts
10:
00 and continue until late evening. Everyone is
1559 welcome, and there is no fee to participate. There is on the other
1560 hand limited space, and only room for
30 people. Please put your name
1561 on
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
1562 wiki page
</a> if you plan to join us.
</p>
1568 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
1573 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1577 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?
</a>
1583 <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
1584 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
1585 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41
</a>. Unfortunately I did not have much
1586 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
1587 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived. I
1589 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230
</a>
1590 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
1591 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly. But my
1592 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful. More
1595 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
1596 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
1597 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
1598 feature at
<a href=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt
</a>, which
1599 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
1600 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
1601 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
1602 disks from my search parameters. I also asked around among friends to
1603 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.
</p>
1605 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
1606 X41. I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
1607 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
1608 hand a lot more to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly
1609 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
1610 I will get used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
1611 needed a new laptop now. :)
</p>
1613 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple. All it took was a quick
1614 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.
</p>
1616 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop. The
180 GB SSD disk
1617 lock up during load. And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
1618 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
1619 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
1620 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
1621 default in Ubuntu). And the bug with is already known. It was
1622 reported to Debian as
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
1623 report #
691427 2012-
10-
25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
1624 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD). It is also reported to the Linux
1625 kernel developers as
1626 <a href=
"https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
1627 report #
51861 2012-
12-
20</a> (Intel SSD
520 stops working under load
1628 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
1629 Lenovo forums, both for
1630 <a href=
"http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
1631 2012-
11-
10</a> and for
1632 <a href=
"http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
1633 03-
20-
2013</a>. The problem do not only affect installation. The
1634 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
1635 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
1636 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
1638 <a href=
"https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
1639 available
</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
1640 minutes by writing to a file.
</p>
1642 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
1643 contacting PCHELP Norway (request
01D1FDP) which handle support
1644 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
1645 firmware. Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
1646 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i). I
1647 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
1654 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>.
1659 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1663 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230
</a>
1669 <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
1670 trusty old Thinkpad X41. Unfortunately I did not have much time to
1671 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived. I ended up
1672 picking a
<a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
1673 X230
</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu
1674 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly. As I write
1675 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
1676 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
1677 with an expencive door stop.
</p>
1679 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
1680 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
1681 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
1682 feature at
<ahref=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt
</a>, which
1683 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
1684 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
1685 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.
</p>
1687 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
1688 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
1689 to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly good and the
1690 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
1691 used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
1692 new laptop now. :)
</p>
1694 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.
</p>
1700 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>.
1705 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1709 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram
0.4)
</a>
1715 <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
1716 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
1717 working. One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
1718 needed to get the hardware on my computer working. Most often this
1719 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
1720 controller or the ethernet card. Today I pushed version
0.4 of the
1721 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package
</a>
1722 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
1723 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
1724 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
1725 debian packages. Here is a test run on my laptop:
</p>
1728 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
1729 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
1730 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
1731 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
1732 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
1733 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
1736 Preconfiguring packages ...
1737 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
1738 (Reading database ...
259727 files and directories currently installed.)
1739 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
1740 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (
0.28+squeeze1) ...
1744 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
1745 printed instead:
</p>
1748 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
1749 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
1753 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
1754 me some time when setting up new machines. :)
</p>
1756 <p>So, how does it work? It look at the set of currently loaded
1757 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
1758 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information. Next, it
1759 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
1760 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
1761 requested firmware file. If the package is in the non-free section, a
1762 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
1763 <tt>apt-get install
</tt>. The end result is a slightly better working
1766 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
1767 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
1768 finally fix
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
1769 #
655507</a>. There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
1770 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
1771 from the nearby Debian mirror.
</p>
1777 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>.
1782 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1786 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video
</a>
1792 <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
1793 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
1794 or on first boot from the hard disk. I've seen it once in a while the
1795 last few years, but only recently understood the cause. I've seen it
1796 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
1797 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops. The system to
1798 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
1799 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead. I do
1800 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
1801 i915 driver used by the
1802 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
1803 EasyNote LV
</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.
</p>
1805 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways. Either by adding
1806 i915.invert_brightness=
1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
1807 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=
1
1808 option when it load the i915 kernel module. On Debian and Ubuntu, it
1809 can be done by running these commands as root:
</p>
1812 echo options i915 invert_brightness=
1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
1813 update-initramfs -u -k all
1816 <p>Since March
2012 there is
1817 <a href=
"http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
1818 mechanism in the Linux kernel
</a> to tell the i915 driver which
1819 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
1820 brightness setting automatically. To use it, one need to add a row in
1821 <a href=
"http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
1822 intel_quirks array
</a> in the driver source
1823 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
</tt> (look for "
<tt>static
1824 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks
</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
1825 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
1828 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
1829 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
1832 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
1833 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
1834 (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
1835 Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
1836 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
1837 ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
1838 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
1839 <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
1841 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
1842 Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
1843 Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
1844 Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
1845 Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
1846 Capabilities: <access denied>
1847 Kernel driver in use: i915
1850 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
1853 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
1855 /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
1856 { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
1861 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
1862 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
1863 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
1864 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
">dri-devel
1865 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
1866 developers. But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
1868 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/
2013-June/thread.html
">the
1869 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
1870 emails from non-subscribers. Because of this, I sent my patch also to
1871 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
1872 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
1873 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
1875 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
1876 with this problem working properly with Linux. If you use Gnome, your
1877 worries should be over at this point. But if you use KDE, there is
1878 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
1879 the screen during login. I've reported it to Debian as
1880 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
1881 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
1882 this. Perhaps you can help? Perhaps you know what the Gnome
1883 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
1884 developers? Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
1885 during login? If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
1886 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
1888 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
1889 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
1890 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
1891 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
1898 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>.
1903 <div class="padding
"></div>
1907 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html
">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
1913 <p>Two days ago, I asked
1914 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html
">how
1915 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
1916 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>. I found a solution, but am horrified
1917 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
1920 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
1921 secure booting or fast boot. I suspect fast boot was the problem,
1922 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
1923 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
1926 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
1927 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive! This is as far as I
1928 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
1929 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement. I am told (and
1930 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
1931 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8. But as I believe the terms
1932 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
1933 was never an alternative. I do not enter agreements I do not intend
1936 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
1937 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
1938 work. But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
1939 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops. Is
1940 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
1941 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
1942 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms? Or at least not
1943 without risking to loose the warranty?
</p>
1946 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
1947 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV
</a>, to ensure the next person
1948 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
1951 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
1952 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.
</p>
1958 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>.
1963 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1967 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows
8?
</a>
1973 <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days. I bought three
1974 new laptops for my parents and a few others. I bought Packard Bell
1975 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer. But I
1976 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it. The
1977 computer is preinstalled with Windows
8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
1978 instead of a BIOS to boot.
</p>
1980 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
1981 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick. I have yet
1982 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work. when I turn on
1983 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
1984 the normal boot menu. I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
1985 USB stick booting. When booting, it first ask for the language to
1986 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
1987 Windows
8 terms of use. As these terms are completely unacceptable to
1988 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
1989 to get it to boot the Linux installer.
</p>
1991 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
1992 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
1993 EasyNote LV
</a> model. If you have any idea how to get Linux
1994 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
1995 page. If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
1996 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.
</p>
1998 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
1999 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
2006 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>.
2011 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2015 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation
</a>
2021 <p><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a> is
2022 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It
2023 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
2024 pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server,
2025 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
2026 educational software. The project was founded almost
12 years ago,
2027 2001-
07-
02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for
2028 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
2029 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
2030 donate some money
</a>.
2032 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
2033 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
2034 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation. It isn't very
2035 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
2036 the Debian Edu installer.
</p>
2039 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless
<a/>
2040 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
2041 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
2042 into a Debian Edu Workstation:
</p>
2046 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.
</li>
2047 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.
</li>
2048 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
2049 our configuration.
</li>
2050 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
2051 /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
2052 according to the profile specified in the config above,
2053 overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.
</li>
2054 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
2055 that could not be done using preseeding.
</li>
2056 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.
</li>
2060 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
2061 replicated like this. Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
2062 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
2063 the needed packages.
</p>
2065 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
2066 setting up
<a href=
"http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi
</a> as a
2067 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
2068 <a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage">Raspbian
</a> installation and
2069 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
2070 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).
</p>
2072 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
2073 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
2074 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:
</p>
2077 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
2081 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
2082 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
2083 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
2090 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
2095 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2099 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?
</a>
2106 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
2107 announced a
</a> new
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
2108 channel #debian-lego
</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
2109 community interested in
<a href=
"http://www.lego.com/">LEGO
</a>, the
2110 marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created
2111 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page
</a> to have
2112 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several
2113 people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my
2114 call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
2115 <a href=
"http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego
</a>
2116 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count
10 packages related to
2117 LEGO and
<a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms
</a>:
</p>
2120 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos
</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++
</td></tr>
2121 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad
</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software
</td></tr>
2122 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt
</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX
</td></tr>
2123 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd
</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS
</td></tr>
2124 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc
</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
</td></tr>
2125 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc
</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX
</td></tr>
2126 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt
</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
</td></tr>
2127 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer
</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT
</td></tr>
2128 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch
</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages
8 and up
</td></tr>
2129 <tr><td><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n
</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
</td></tr>
2132 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
2133 currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only
2134 available in experimental.
</p>
2136 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
2137 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
2138 for LEGO designers.
</p>
2144 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/robot">robot
</a>.
2149 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2153 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy
</a>
2159 <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
2160 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
2161 for Debian Wheezy
</a> was waiting in my mail box. This is a great
2162 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
2165 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
2166 in particular make me very happy to see included. The
2167 <a href=
"http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch
</a> program, made famous by
2168 the
<a href=
"http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code
</a> movement, is
2169 included for the first time. Alongside similar programs like
2170 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle
</a> and
2171 <a href=
"http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart
</a>,
2172 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
2173 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
2174 computer. Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
2177 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
2178 Edu/Skolelinux release too. The
2179 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
2180 alpha release
</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
2187 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
2192 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2196 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram
0.2 finally in the Debian archive
</a>
2202 <p>Today the
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
2203 package
</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
2204 for many months. I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
2205 2013-
01-
27, and today it was accepted into the archive.
</p>
2207 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
2208 install to work with a pluggable hardware device. The suggestion pop
2209 up when the device is plugged in. For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
2210 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
2211 the NXT controller. Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
2218 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>.
2223 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2227 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)
</a>
2234 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
2235 bitcoin related blog post
</a> mentioned that the new
2236 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package
</a> for
2237 Debian was waiting in NEW. It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
2238 2013-
01-
19, and have been available in unstable since then. It was
2239 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
2242 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
2243 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
2244 architectures. For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
2245 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
2246 architectures (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #
672524</a>).
2247 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
2248 no-one have been able to propose a fix. If you got an idea what is
2249 failing, please let us know via the BTS.
</p>
2251 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
2252 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
2253 if it run short on space (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
2254 #
696715</a>). So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
2257 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2258 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2259 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
2265 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
2270 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2274 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!
</a>
2281 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
2282 for testers
</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
2283 pluggable hardware devices, which I
2284 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
2285 out to create
</a> earlier this month. Several valuable testers showed
2286 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
2287 people. But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
2288 for this project. Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
2289 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name. In the
2290 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
2291 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint
</a>
2292 repository in Debian. The new name? It is
<strong>Isenkram
</strong>.
2293 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use
</p>
2296 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
2297 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
2300 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet. If you
2301 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
2302 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
2303 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)
</p>
2305 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
2306 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc. Typical hardware
2307 stuff, in other words. I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
2308 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
2311 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
2312 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
2315 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
2316 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.
</p>
2322 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>.
2327 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2331 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian
</a>
2337 <p>Early this month I set out to try to
2338 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
2339 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices
</a>. Now my
2340 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience. To test
2342 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
2343 from the Debian Edu subversion repository
</a>, build and install the
2344 package. You might have to log out and in again activate the
2345 autostart script.
</p>
2347 <p>The design is simple:
</p>
2351 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
2352 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.
</li>
2354 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
2355 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
2358 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
2359 the APT database, a database
2360 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
2361 via HTTP
</a> and a database available as part of the package.
</li>
2363 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
2364 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
2365 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
2366 package or packages.
</li>
2368 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
2369 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.
</li>
2371 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
2372 package while showing progress information in a window.
</li>
2376 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system. Here
2377 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action. First the
2378 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
2379 approve all the dependencies. Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.
</p>
2381 <p><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
2382 <br><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
2383 <br><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
2384 <br><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
2385 <br><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width=
"70%"></p>
2387 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
2388 is already useful. The database of hardware to package mappings also
2389 need more work. It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
2390 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
2391 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
2392 method. I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
2393 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
2394 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.
</p>
2396 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
21 16:
50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
2397 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
2399 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
2400 hw-support-handler; debuild
</tt>'. If you lack debuild, install the
2401 devscripts package.
</p>
2403 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
23 12:
00</strong>: The project is now
2404 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
2405 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository. See
2406 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
2407 instructions
</a> for details.
</p>
2413 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>.
2418 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2422 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service
</a>
2428 <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died. It died quietly and
2429 suddenly in bed. With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
2430 black. The power button was no longer able to turn it on. It was a
2431 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had. Better than both
2432 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S. Far better than the
2433 Compaq I had before that. Now I need to find a replacement. To keep
2434 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
2435 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
2436 not a durable solution.
2438 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest. This is my wishlist from when I
2439 got a new one more than
10 years ago. It still holds true.:)
</p>
2443 <li>Lightweight (around
1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
2445 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.
</li>
2446 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.
</li>
2447 <li>Long battery life time. Preferable a week.
</li>
2448 <li>Internal WIFI network card.
</li>
2449 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.
</li>
2450 <li>Some USB slots (
2-
3 is plenty)
</li>
2451 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.
</li>
2452 <li>Video resolution at least
1024x768, with size around
12" (A4 paper
2454 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
2455 X.org packages.
</li>
2456 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
2461 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
2462 list. The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
2463 last
10-
15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
2464 at other features to choose my laptop. But are there still made as
2465 robust laptops as my X41? The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
2466 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
2467 Lenovo took over. But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
2468 still be useful.
</p>
2470 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
2471 external keyboard? I'll have to check the
2472 <a href=
"http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site
</a> for
2473 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
2474 of the vendors listed on the
<a href=
"http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
2475 Pre-loaded site
</a>.
</p>
2481 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>.
2486 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2490 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type
</a>
2496 <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
2497 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
2498 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
2499 done by Ubuntu
</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
2500 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
2501 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
2502 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:
</p>
2508 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
2513 version = pkg.candidate
2515 version = pkg.installed
2518 record = version.record
2519 if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
2521 mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
2522 for t in mime_types:
2523 t = t.rstrip().strip()
2525 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
2527 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
2528 if
1 < len(sys.argv):
2529 mimetype = sys.argv[
1]
2530 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
2531 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
2535 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:
</p>
2538 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
2539 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
2541 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
2542 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
2543 browser-plugin-gnash
2547 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
2548 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
2549 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
2550 anyone working on adding it?
</p>
2552 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
18 14:
20</strong>: The Debian BTS
2553 request for icweasel support for this feature is
2554 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#
484010</a> from
2008 (and
2555 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#
698426</a> from today). Lack
2556 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
2557 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.
</p>
2563 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>.
2568 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2572 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?
</a>
2578 <p>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-
11
2579 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive
</a>, is a
2580 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
2581 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
2582 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
2583 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
2584 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
2585 downloaded by the browser.
</p>
2587 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
2588 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
2589 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
2591 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
2592 site
</a>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
2593 answer the question in the title. Here are the
20 most supported MIME
2594 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
2595 The complete list is available from the link above.
</p>
2597 <p><strong>Debian Stable:
</strong></p>
2601 ----- -----------------------
2617 18 application/x-ogg
2624 <p><strong>Debian Testing:
</strong></p>
2628 ----- -----------------------
2644 18 application/x-ogg
2651 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:
</strong></p>
2655 ----- -----------------------
2672 18 application/x-ogg
2678 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
2679 information mentioned in DEP-
11. I have not yet had time to look at
2680 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
2683 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
16 13:
35</strong>: Updated numbers after
2684 discovering a typo in my script.
</p>
2690 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>.
2695 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2699 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware
</a>
2705 <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
2706 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
2707 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a> following my hope for
2708 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
2709 dongle support in Debian
</a>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
2710 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
2711 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
2712 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
2713 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
2716 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
2717 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
2718 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
2722 Package: package-name
2723 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p>
2726 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
2727 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p>
2729 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
2730 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p>
2734 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p>
2737 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
2738 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p>
2741 Package: pcmciautils
2742 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
2745 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
2746 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p>
2749 Package: colorhug-client
2750 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p>
2753 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
2754 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
2755 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p>
2757 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
2758 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
2759 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
2760 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
2761 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I've
2762 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
2763 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
2766 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
2767 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
2768 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
2769 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
2771 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup
</a>
2772 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
2773 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
2774 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p>
2776 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
2777 install yubikey-personalization:
</p>
2780 % ./hw-support-lookup
2781 <br>yubikey-personalization
2785 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
2786 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p>
2789 % ./hw-support-lookup
2794 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
2795 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
2796 database
</a>, please tell me about it.
</p>
2798 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
2799 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
2800 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
2801 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
2802 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
2803 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
2804 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
2807 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
2808 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
2809 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
2810 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
2816 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>.
2821 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2825 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware
</a>
2831 <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
2832 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
2833 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
2834 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
2836 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
2837 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a>:
2839 <p><strong>Modalias decoded
</strong></p>
2841 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
2842 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
2843 <URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a> >,
2844 <URL:
<a href=
"http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/
26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device
</a> >,
2845 <URL:
<a href=
"http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c
</a> > and
2846 <URL:
<a href=
"http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup
</a> >.
2848 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
2849 this shell script:
</p>
2852 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
2855 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
2859 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
2860 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
2861 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
2865 <p><strong>PCI subtype
</strong></p>
2867 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
2868 Bridge memory controller:
</p>
2871 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
2874 <p>This represent these values:
</p>
2879 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
2880 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
2882 sc
00 (bus subclass)
2886 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
2887 -n' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
2888 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
2889 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p>
2891 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
2894 <p><strong>USB subtype
</strong></p>
2896 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
2897 USB hub in a laptop:
</p>
2900 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
2903 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p>
2906 v
1D6B (device vendor)
2907 p
0001 (device product)
2909 dc
09 (device class)
2910 dsc
00 (device subclass)
2911 dp
00 (device protocol)
2912 ic
09 (interface class)
2913 isc
00 (interface subclass)
2914 ip
00 (interface protocol)
2917 <p>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
2918 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
2919 these alias entries show up:
</p>
2922 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
2923 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
2924 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
2925 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
2928 <p>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
2929 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
2930 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p>
2932 <p><strong>ACPI subtype
</strong></p>
2934 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
2935 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p>
2938 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
2941 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p>
2943 <p><strong>DMI subtype
</strong></p>
2945 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
2946 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
2947 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p>
2950 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
2953 <p>The values present are
</p>
2956 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
2957 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
2958 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
2959 svn IBM (system vendor)
2960 pn
2371H4G (product name)
2961 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
2962 rvn IBM (board vendor)
2963 rn
2371H4G (board name)
2964 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
2965 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
2966 ct
10 (chassis type)
2967 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
2970 <p>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
2971 found in the dmidecode source:
</p>
2975 4 Low Profile Desktop
2988 17 Main Server Chassis
2989 18 Expansion Chassis
2991 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
2992 21 Peripheral Chassis
2994 23 Rack Mount Chassis
3003 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
3004 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
3005 claim it is a desktop.
</p>
3007 <p><strong>SerIO subtype
</strong></p>
3009 <p>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
3013 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
3016 <p>The values present are
</p>
3025 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
3026 the valid values are.
</p>
3028 <p><strong>Other subtypes
</strong></p>
3030 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
3031 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
3032 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
3033 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
3034 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
3035 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
3036 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p>
3038 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong></p>
3040 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
3041 one can use the following shell script:
</p>
3044 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
3046 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/ /' ; \
3050 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
3051 list is very long on my test machine):
</p>
3055 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
3057 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
3059 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
3060 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
3061 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
3062 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
3063 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
3064 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
3065 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
3066 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
3070 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
3071 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
3072 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
3073 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
3075 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
3076 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
3077 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p>
3083 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>.
3088 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3092 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint
</a>
3098 <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
3099 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
3100 Launcher and updated the Debian package
3101 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile
</a> to make
3102 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
3103 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
3104 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
3105 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
3106 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
3107 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream
</a>
3108 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
3109 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
3110 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
3111 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
3112 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
3113 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
3114 view
</a> or use "
<tt>git clone
3115 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt>".</p>
3121 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/robot
">robot</a>.
3126 <div class="padding
"></div>
3130 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
3136 <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
3137 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
3138 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
3139 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
3140 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
3141 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
3142 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
3143 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
3144 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
3145 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
3146 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
3148 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
3149 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
3150 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>. The idea is fairly
3155 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
3156 starting when a user log in.</li>
3158 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
3159 hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
3161 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
3162 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
3165 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
3166 package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
3170 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
3171 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
3172 discover database to find packages and
3173 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit</a> to install
3176 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
3177 draft package is now checked into
3178 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
3179 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>. In the process, I updated the
3180 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data</a>
3181 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
3182 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
3183 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
3184 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover</a>
3185 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
3186 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
3187 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
3188 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
3189 because of the freeze).</p>
3191 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
3192 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
3195 <p align="center
"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p>
3197 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
3198 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
3199 program(s)" button should to be implemented.
</p>
3201 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
3202 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
3203 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
3204 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
3205 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
3206 reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
3207 such mapping, please let me know.
</p>
3209 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
3210 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
3211 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
3212 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
3213 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
3214 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
3215 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
3216 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
3217 not be installed?
</p>
3219 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
3220 please send me an email. :)
</p>
3226 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>.
3231 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3235 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian
</a>
3241 <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
3242 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
3243 NXT
</a>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
3244 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
3245 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
3246 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
3247 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego
</a> (server
3248 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
3249 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
3250 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p>
3252 <p>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
3253 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page
</a>
3254 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p>
3260 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/robot">robot
</a>.
3265 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3269 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version
0.7.2-
2 to Debian Squeeze
</a>
3275 <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
3276 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p>
3278 <p><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin
</a>, the digital
3279 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
3280 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
3281 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
3282 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a> is about to improve a bit.
3283 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
3284 package
</a> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
3285 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue
</A>
3286 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
3289 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
3290 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
3291 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p>
3294 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
3296 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
3297 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
3300 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
3301 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
3302 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
3303 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
3304 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
3305 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
3306 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
3307 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
3308 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p>
3310 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3311 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3312 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
3318 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
3323 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3327 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</a>
3333 <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
3334 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin
</a>, the decentralised
3335 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
3336 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
3337 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
3338 Debian
</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
3339 is now maintained by a
3340 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
3341 people
</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
3342 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
3343 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
3344 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
3345 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
3346 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
3347 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
3348 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
3350 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
3351 Ubuntu
</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
3354 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
3355 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
3356 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
3357 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
3358 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
3359 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
3360 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
3361 patch to backport
</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
3362 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
3363 new version to unstable.
3365 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
3366 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
3367 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
3368 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
3369 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
3370 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
3371 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
3372 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
3373 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
3374 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
3375 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
3376 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
3377 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
3378 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
3379 have not tested them.
</p>
3382 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
3383 with bitcoins
</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
3384 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
3385 years ago, as can be
3386 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
3387 on the blockexplorer service
</a>. Thank you everyone for your
3388 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
3389 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
3390 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
3391 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
3392 the same address as last time,
3393 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
3399 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
3404 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3408 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists
</a>
3415 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
3416 this summer
</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
3417 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
3418 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
3419 repository for the project
</a>.
</p>
3421 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
3422 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
3423 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
3424 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p>
3426 <p>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
3427 PostScript formats at
3428 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
3429 Science Songbook
</a>.
</p>
3435 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/multimedia">multimedia
</a>.
3440 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3444 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med
19-årsdagen, Debian!
</a>
3451 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet
19
3452 år
</a>. Jeg har fulgt det de siste
12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
3453 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!
</p>
3459 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk
</a>.
3464 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3468 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists
</a>
3474 <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
3475 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø
</a>, I started
3476 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
3477 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
3478 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
3479 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
3480 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
3481 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
3482 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
3483 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
3484 missing in my book.
</p>
3486 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
3487 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
3488 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
3489 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
3490 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
3491 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
3492 Computer Science Songbook
</a>.
3498 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/multimedia">multimedia
</a>.
3503 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3507 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</a>
3513 <p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
3514 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
3515 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
3516 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
3517 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
3518 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
3519 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
3520 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
3521 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
3522 the tools to do so.
</p>
3524 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
3525 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
3526 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
3527 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P>
3529 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
3530 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file
</a>
3531 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
3532 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
3533 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
3534 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
3535 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
3536 be activated on the first reboot.
</p>
3538 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
3539 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
3540 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p>
3546 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
3548 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
3550 'XML::Simple' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple',
3552 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
3553 eval "use $module;";
3555 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
3556 system("yum install -y $pkg");
3557 eval "use $module;";
3561 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
3567 sub run_firmware_script {
3568 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
3570 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
3573 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
3575 if (
0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
3576 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
3578 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
3582 sub run_firmware_scripts {
3583 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
3584 # Run firmware packages
3585 for my $dir (@dirs) {
3586 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
3587 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
3588 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
3589 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
3590 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
3598 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
3599 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
3604 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
3607 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
3609 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
3610 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
3612 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
3616 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
3617 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
3618 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
3619 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
3622 for my $url (@paths) {
3623 fetch_dell_fw($url);
3625 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
3627 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
3628 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
3632 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
3633 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
3639 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
3643 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
3644 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
3645 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
3646 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
3647 my $filename = shift;
3649 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
3651 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
3653 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
3655 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
3657 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
3658 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
3659 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
3661 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
3662 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
3664 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
3666 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
3668 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
3671 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
3672 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
3674 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
3675 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
3677 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
3678 for my $path (@paths) {
3679 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
3680 push(@paths, $cpath);
3688 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
3689 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
3690 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
3691 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
3698 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>.
3703 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3707 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel
1 different from single user boots?
</a>
3713 <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
3714 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
3715 comments and opinions
</a> on my blog post on
3716 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
3717 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a> and my blog post about
3718 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
3719 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a>. I only have time to address one
3720 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
3721 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p>
3724 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
3725 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
3726 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
3729 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
3730 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
3731 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
3732 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
3733 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
3734 mode. I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
3735 hard to explain.
</p>
3737 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
3738 "
<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt>". This means the only thing that is
3739 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
3740 state "between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
3741 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
3742 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
3743 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
3744 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
3745 runs "init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
3746 1. It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
3747 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
3750 <p>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
3751 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
3752 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". When booting into
3753 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
3754 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". A problem show up when
3755 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
3756 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
3757 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
3758 after visiting single user mode.</p>
3760 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
3761 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
3762 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
3763 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
3764 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
3765 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
3766 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
3767 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
3769 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
3770 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
3771 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
3777 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem
">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian
">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english
">english</a>.
3782 <div class="padding
"></div>
3786 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
3792 <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
3793 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
3794 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
3795 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
3796 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
3797 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
3798 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
3799 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
3800 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
3801 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
3802 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
3803 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
3804 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
3806 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
3807 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
3808 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
3809 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
3810 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
3811 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
3812 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
3813 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
3814 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
3816 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
3817 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
3818 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
3821 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
3822 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
3823 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
3824 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
3825 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
3826 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
3827 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
3828 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
3829 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
3830 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
3831 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
3832 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
3833 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
3834 find time to push this forward.</p>
3840 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem
">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian
">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english
">english</a>.
3845 <div class="padding
"></div>
3849 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
3855 <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
3856 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
3857 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
3858 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
3861 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
3862 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
3863 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
3867 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
3868 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
3869 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
3870 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
3871 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
3872 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
3873 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
3876 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
3877 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
3878 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
3879 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
3880 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
3881 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
3882 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
3883 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
3884 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
3885 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
3886 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
3887 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
3888 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
3890 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
3891 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
3892 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
3893 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
3894 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
3895 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
3896 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
3897 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
3898 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
3899 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
3901 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
3902 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
3903 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
3904 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
3905 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
3906 latter behaviour.</li>
3910 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
3911 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
3912 it do not matter much.</p>
3914 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
3915 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
3916 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
3922 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/multimedia
">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web
">web</a>.
3927 <div class="padding
"></div>
3931 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
3937 <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</A>
3938 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
3939 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
3940 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
3941 security support for a few years.</p>
3943 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
3944 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
3945 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
3946 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet</a> clone
3947 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
3948 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
3949 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
3950 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
3951 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
3952 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
3953 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
3954 easier in the future.</p>
3956 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
3957 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
3958 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
3959 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
3960 do not have time for.</p>
3966 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/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami</a>.
3971 <div class="padding
"></div>
3975 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
3981 <p>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
3982 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
3983 update in English.</p>
3985 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
3986 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
3987 of the British service
3988 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
3989 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
3990 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
3991 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
3992 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
3993 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
3994 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
3995 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
3996 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
3997 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</a> is using
3998 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
3999 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
4000 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
4002 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
4003 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
4004 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
4005 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
4006 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
4007 public infrastructure.</p>
4009 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
4016 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/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart
">kart</a>.
4021 <div class="padding
"></div>
4025 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
4031 <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
4032 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
4033 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
4034 available on the Internet, and check our locally
4035 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
4036 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
4037 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
4038 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
4039 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
4040 out which security holes were present in our free software
4043 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
4044 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
4045 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
4046 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
4047 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
4048 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
4049 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
4050 solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
4051 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
4052 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
4053 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
4054 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
4055 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
4056 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
4057 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
4058 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
4060 <p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
4061 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
4062 check out, one could look up
4063 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%
3A%
2Fa%
3Agnu%
3Agzip:
1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
4064 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
4065 The most recent one is
4066 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
4067 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
4068 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
4070 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
4071 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
4072 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
4073 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
4074 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
4075 security issues out.</p>
4077 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
4078 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
4079 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
4081 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
4082 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
4083 information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
4085 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
4086 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
4087 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
4088 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
4089 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
4090 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
4091 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
4092 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
4093 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
4094 established soon.</p>
4096 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
4097 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
4098 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
4099 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
4100 for their packages.</p>
4106 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/sikkerhet
">sikkerhet</a>.
4111 <div class="padding
"></div>
4115 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
4122 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data</a>
4123 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
4124 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
4125 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
4126 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
4127 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
4128 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
4129 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
4130 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>. The relevant output on
4131 one of my machines like this:</p>
4135 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
4138 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
4147 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
4148 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
4151 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
4152 echo loaded pci modules:
4154 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
4155 for address in * ; do
4156 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
4157 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
4158 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
4159 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
4160 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
3}'`
4170 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
4174 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
4175 echo loaded usb modules:
4177 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
4178 for address in * ; do
4179 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
4180 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
4181 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
4182 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
4183 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
6}')
4195 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
4202 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>.
4207 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4211 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux
</a>
4217 <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
4218 href=
"http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo
</a> testing if the new
4219 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
4220 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
4221 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
4222 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
4223 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
4224 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
4227 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
4228 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
4229 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
4230 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
4231 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
4232 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
4233 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
4234 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p>
4236 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
4237 I perform on a new model.
</p>
4241 <li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
4242 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
4243 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li>
4245 <li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
4246 installation, X.org is working.
</li>
4248 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
4249 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
4250 reported by the program.
</li>
4252 <li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
4253 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
4254 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
4255 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
4256 normally test this by playing
4257 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
4258 video
</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li>
4260 <li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
4261 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
4263 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
4264 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
4266 <li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
4267 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li>
4269 <li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
4270 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
4273 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
4274 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
4277 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
4278 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
4281 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
4282 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
4283 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
4284 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
4287 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
4288 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
4289 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
4294 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
4295 for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
4296 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
4297 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
4298 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
4299 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
4300 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
4301 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p>
4307 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
4312 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4316 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins
</a>
4322 <p>As I continue to explore
4323 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>, I've starting to wonder
4324 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
4325 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p>
4327 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
4328 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
4329 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
4330 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
4331 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
4332 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
4333 all transactions. There I can see that my address
4334 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a>
4335 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
4336 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a>
4337 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
4338 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A>
4339 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
4340 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
4341 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
4342 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
4343 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
4344 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
4345 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
4346 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p>
4348 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
4349 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
4350 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
4351 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
4352 If the Skolelinux foundation
4353 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
4354 Debian Labs
</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
4355 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
4356 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
4357 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
4358 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
4359 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
4360 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p>
4362 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
4363 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
4364 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
4365 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
4366 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
4367 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
4368 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
4369 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
4370 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
4371 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
4372 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
4373 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
4374 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
4375 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
4378 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
4379 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
4380 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
4381 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get
50
4382 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
4383 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
4384 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
4385 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
4387 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool
</a>
4388 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
4389 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
4390 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
4393 <p>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
4394 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
4395 criticism
</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
4396 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
4397 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p>
4403 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<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/personvern">personvern
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>.
4408 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4412 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money
</a>
4418 <p>With this weeks lawless
4419 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
4420 attacks
</a> on Wikileak and
4421 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
4422 speech
</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
4423 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
4425 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
4426 Phipps on bitcoin
</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
4427 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
4428 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>. I got
4429 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
4430 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
4431 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p>
4433 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
4434 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
4435 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
4436 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
4437 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
4438 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
4439 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
4440 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
4441 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
4442 Debian
</a> soon.
</p>
4444 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
4445 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
4446 bitcoins
</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
4447 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
4448 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
4449 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
4451 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free
</a> (
0.05
4452 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
4453 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch
</a> to keep an eye
4454 on the current exchange rates.
</p>
4456 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
4457 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
4458 donations to the address
4459 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b>. Thank you!
</p>
4465 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin
</a>,
<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/personvern">personvern
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>.
4470 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4474 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?
</a>
4480 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
4481 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
4482 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
4483 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
4484 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
4485 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
4486 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
4487 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p>
4489 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
4490 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
4491 Edu/Skolelinux
</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
4492 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
4493 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
4494 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
4495 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
4496 tested the browser plugins
</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
4497 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
4498 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
4499 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P>
4501 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
4502 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
4503 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
4504 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
4505 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
4506 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
4507 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
4508 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
4509 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
4510 what is going on.
</p>
4516 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/multimedia">multimedia
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
4521 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4525 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove
</a>
4531 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
4532 upgrade testing of the
4533 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
4534 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a> to do
<tt>apt-get autoremove
</tt> when using apt-get.
4535 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
4536 can now present the updated result from today:
</p>
4538 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
4540 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
4547 browser-plugin-gnash
4554 freedesktop-sound-theme
4556 gconf-defaults-service
4571 gnome-desktop-environment
4575 gnome-session-canberra
4580 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
4586 libapache2-mod-dnssd
4589 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
4592 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
4593 libboost-python1.42
.0
4594 libboost-thread1.42
.0
4596 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
4598 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
4605 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
4620 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
4625 libgtksourceview2.0-common
4626 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
4627 libmono-addins0.2-cil
4628 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
4629 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
4630 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
4631 libmono-posix2.0-cil
4632 libmono-security2.0-cil
4633 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
4634 libmono-system2.0-cil
4637 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
4638 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
4648 libtelepathy-farsight0
4657 nautilus-sendto-empathy
4661 python-aptdaemon-gtk
4663 python-beautifulsoup
4678 python-gtksourceview2
4689 python-pkg-resources
4696 python-twisted-conch
4702 python-zope.interface
4707 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
4714 system-config-printer-udev
4716 telepathy-mission-control-
5
4729 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
4737 fast-user-switch-applet
4756 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
4758 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
4764 system-config-printer
4771 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
4774 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
4777 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
4783 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
4785 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
4791 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
4798 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
4814 kdeartwork-emoticons
4816 kdeartwork-theme-icon
4820 kdebase-workspace-bin
4821 kdebase-workspace-data
4835 kscreensaver-xsavers
4850 plasma-dataengines-workspace
4852 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
4853 plasma-runners-addons
4854 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
4855 plasma-scriptengine-python
4856 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
4857 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
4858 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
4859 plasma-scriptengines
4860 plasma-wallpapers-addons
4861 plasma-widget-folderview
4862 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
4866 xscreensaver-data-extra
4868 xscreensaver-gl-extra
4869 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
4872 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
4876 google-gadgets-common
4894 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
4899 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
4908 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
4910 libplasmagenericshell4
4924 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
4925 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
4927 libsmokektexteditor3
4935 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
4941 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
4953 plasma-dataengines-addons
4954 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
4955 plasma-widget-lancelot
4956 plasma-widgets-addons
4957 plasma-widgets-workspace
4961 update-notifier-common
4964 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
4965 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
4966 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
4967 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p>
4973 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
4978 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4982 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images
</a>
4988 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
4989 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a>
4990 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
4991 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
4992 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
4993 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
4994 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
4995 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
4996 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p>
4999 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
5000 nice recipe
</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
5001 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
5002 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
5003 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
5004 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p>
5010 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
5015 if [ -z "$
1" ] ; then
5016 echo "Usage: $
0 <hostname
>"
5022 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
5023 echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
5027 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
5028 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
5029 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
5030 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
5033 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
5034 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
5036 parted $img mklabel msdos
5037 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
5038 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
5039 parted $img set
1 boot on
5042 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
5043 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
5045 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
5046 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
5047 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
5049 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
5050 losetup -d /dev/loop0
5053 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
5054 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p>
5056 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
5057 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
5058 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
5059 seem to work just fine.
</p>
5065 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
5070 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5074 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop
</a>
5080 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
5081 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
5082 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
5083 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p>
5085 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
5086 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
5087 can see if anything should be changed.
</p>
5089 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
5091 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
5094 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
5095 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
5096 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
5097 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
5098 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
5099 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
5100 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
5101 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
5102 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
5103 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
5104 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
5105 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
5106 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
5107 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
5108 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
5109 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
5110 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
5111 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
5112 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
5113 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
5114 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
5115 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
5116 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
5117 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
5118 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
5119 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
5120 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
5121 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
5122 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
5123 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
5124 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
5125 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
5126 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
5127 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
5128 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
5129 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
5130 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
5131 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
5132 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
5133 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
5134 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
5135 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
5136 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
5137 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
5138 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
5139 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
5140 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
5141 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
5142 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
5143 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
5144 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
5145 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
5146 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
5147 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
5148 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
5149 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
5150 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
5151 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
5155 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
5158 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
5159 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
5160 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
5161 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
5162 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
5163 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
5164 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
5165 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
5166 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
5167 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
5168 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
5169 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
5170 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
5171 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
5172 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
5173 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
5174 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
5175 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
5176 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
5177 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
5178 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
5179 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
5180 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
5181 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
5182 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
5183 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
5184 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
5185 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
5186 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
5189 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
5192 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
5195 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
5201 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
5203 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
5206 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
5207 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
5208 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
5209 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
5210 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
5211 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
5212 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
5213 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
5214 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
5215 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
5216 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
5217 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
5218 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
5219 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
5220 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
5221 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
5222 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
5223 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
5224 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
5225 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
5226 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
5227 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
5228 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
5229 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
5230 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
5231 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
5232 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
5233 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
5234 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
5238 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
5241 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
5242 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
5243 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
5244 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
5245 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
5246 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
5247 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
5248 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
5249 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
5250 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
5251 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
5252 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
5253 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
5254 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
5255 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
5256 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
5257 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
5258 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
5259 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
5260 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
5261 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
5262 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
5263 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
5264 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
5265 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
5266 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
5267 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
5268 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
5269 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
5270 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
5271 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
5272 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
5273 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
5276 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
5279 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
5280 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
5281 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
5282 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
5283 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
5284 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
5285 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
5288 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
5291 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
5298 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
5303 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5307 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</a>
5314 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
5315 call from the Gnash project
</a> for
5316 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot
</a> slaves to test the
5317 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
5318 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
5319 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
5320 releases out more often.
</p>
5322 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
5323 I have considered setting up a
<a
5324 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd
</a>
5325 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
5326 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
5327 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
5328 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
5329 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
5330 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
5331 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
5332 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
5333 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
5334 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
5335 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p>
5341 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
5346 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5350 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in
3D
</a>
5356 <p><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
5358 <p>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
5360 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
5361 thingiverse blog
</a>.
</p>
5367 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
5372 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5376 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates
2010-
10-
24</a>
5382 <p>Some updates.
</p>
5384 <p>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge
</a> to
5385 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
5386 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
5387 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
5388 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
5391 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
5392 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
5393 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
5395 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov
</a>,
5396 and can be used using
<tt>kcov
<directory
> <binary
></tt>.
5397 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
5398 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
5399 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
5400 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p>
5402 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
5403 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
5404 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a>, and just published the second
5405 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
5406 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a>
5407 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
5408 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
5409 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
5410 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
5411 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p>
5417 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/multimedia">multimedia
</a>.
5422 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5426 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu
</a>
5432 <p>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
5433 popularity-contest numbers
</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
5434 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
5435 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
5436 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
5437 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
5440 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
5441 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
5442 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
5443 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a>»), one of the most important problems
5444 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
5445 Edu/Skolelinux
</a> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
5446 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
5447 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
5448 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p>
5450 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
5451 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
5452 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
5453 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
5454 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
5455 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
5456 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
5457 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
5458 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
5459 pages they want to visit.
</p>
5461 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
5462 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
5463 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
5464 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
5465 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
5466 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
5467 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
5468 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
5469 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
5470 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
5471 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p>
5477 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/multimedia">multimedia
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
5482 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5486 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</a>
5492 <p>I discovered this while doing
5493 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
5494 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a>. A few packages
5495 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
5496 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
5497 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p>
5499 <p>An example is from todays
5500 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
5501 of KDE using aptitude
</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
5502 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
5503 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
5504 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
5505 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
5506 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p>
5508 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p>
5511 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
5512 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
5513 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
5514 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
5515 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
5518 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
5519 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug
</a>, and will
5520 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
5521 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
5522 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
5523 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
5524 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
5525 of dependency loops.
</p>
5528 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
5529 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a>, the number of circular
5531 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
5532 is dropping
</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p>
5534 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
5535 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier
</a> and
5536 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour
</a> between
5537 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
5538 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
5545 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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
5550 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5554 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP
</a>
5561 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup
</a>
5563 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
5565 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
5566 all
</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p>
5568 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
5569 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
5570 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
5571 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p>
5573 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
5574 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
5575 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
5577 <p><strong>powerdns
</strong></p>
5579 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
5580 on how to
</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
5583 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
5584 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
5585 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
5586 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
5587 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
5588 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p>
5590 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
5591 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
5592 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
5593 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
5594 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
5595 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
5596 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
5597 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
5598 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
5599 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
5600 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
5601 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
5602 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
5603 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
5604 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
5605 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p>
5608 ldapsearch -h ldap \
5609 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
5610 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
5611 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
5612 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
5613 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
5614 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
5616 ldapsearch -h ldap \
5617 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
5618 -s base -x '(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
5619 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
5620 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
5621 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
5624 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
5625 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
5626 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
5627 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5631 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5633 objectclass: dnsdomain
5634 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
5637 associateddomain: tjener.intern
5639 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5641 objectclass: dnsdomain2
5642 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
5644 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
5645 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
5648 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
5649 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
5650 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
5651 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
5652 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
5653 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
5654 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
5655 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=
10.0.2.2)"
5656 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
5657 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
5658 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
5661 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
5665 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
5666 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
5667 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
5668 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
5669 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
5670 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
5672 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
5673 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
5676 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
5677 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
5678 reverse lookups.
</p>
5680 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
5681 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
5682 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
5683 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p>
5685 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
5686 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
5687 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p>
5689 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
5690 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
5691 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
5692 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
5693 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p>
5695 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
5696 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
5697 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
5698 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
5699 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p>
5701 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
5702 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
5703 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
5704 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
5705 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
5706 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p>
5709 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
5712 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
5713 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
5714 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
5715 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
5716 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
5720 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
5721 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
5722 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
5723 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
5724 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
5725 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p>
5727 <p><strong>ISC dhcp
</strong></p>
5729 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
5730 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
5731 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
5732 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
5733 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p>
5735 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
5736 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
5737 stored. These are the relevant entries from
5738 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p>
5741 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
5742 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
5745 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
5746 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
5747 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
5748 search result is this entry:
</p>
5751 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5754 objectClass: dhcpServer
5755 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5758 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
5759 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
5760 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
5761 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
5762 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
5763 The search result is this entry:
</p>
5766 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5769 objectClass: dhcpService
5770 objectClass: dhcpOptions
5771 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5772 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
5773 dhcpStatements: authoritative
5774 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
5775 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
5776 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
5779 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
5780 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
5781 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
5782 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
5783 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
5784 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
5785 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
5786 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
5787 related computer objects.
</p>
5789 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
5790 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
5791 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
5792 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
5793 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
5797 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5800 objectClass: dhcpHost
5801 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
5802 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
5805 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
5806 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
5807 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
5808 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
5809 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
5810 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
5811 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
5812 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
5813 structural object class.
5815 <p><strong>Conclusion
</strong></p>
5817 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
5818 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
5819 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
5820 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
5821 in the configuration.
</p>
5823 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
5824 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
5825 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
5826 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
5827 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
5830 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
5831 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p>
5835 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
5836 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
5837 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
5838 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
5839 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
5840 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
5841 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
5842 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
5843 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
5844 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
5847 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
5848 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
5849 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
5850 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p>
5852 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
5856 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5859 objectClass: dhcpHost
5860 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
5861 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
5862 associateddomain: hostname.intern
5863 arecord:
10.11.12.13
5864 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
5865 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
5868 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
5869 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
5870 auxiliary object class.
</p>
5876 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
5881 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5885 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</a>
5891 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
5892 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
5893 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
5894 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
5895 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p>
5897 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
5898 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p>
5900 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
5901 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
5902 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
5903 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
5904 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
5905 to a slave DNS server.
</p>
5907 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
5908 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
5909 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
5910 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
5911 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
5914 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
5915 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
5916 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
5920 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5922 objectClass: dhcphost
5923 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
5924 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
5925 associateddomain: hostname.intern
5926 arecord:
10.11.12.13
5927 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
5928 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
5932 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
5933 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
5934 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
5935 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p>
5937 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
5938 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
5939 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
5940 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
5941 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
5942 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
5943 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
5944 might be a good place to put it.
</p>
5946 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
5947 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
5953 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
5958 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5962 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</a>
5968 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
5969 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
5970 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
5971 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p>
5973 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
5974 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
5975 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
5976 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
5979 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
5980 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
5981 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p>
5983 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
5984 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
5985 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p>
5988 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
5990 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
5992 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
5993 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
5994 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
5996 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
5997 # existence of attribute names.
5999 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
6000 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
6001 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
6003 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
6004 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
6006 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
6009 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
6011 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
6012 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
6013 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
6014 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $
5}'|sort -u) ; do
6015 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
6016 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
6017 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
6018 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
6019 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
6020 # bass value on to clients
6021 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
6027 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
6028 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
6029 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
6030 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
6031 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p>
6033 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
6034 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
6036 <p>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
6037 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
6038 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
6039 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a>. I found its
6040 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files
</a> on a
6041 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p>
6047 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
6052 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6056 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
6063 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
6064 last post
</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
6065 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
6066 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer
</a> is claimed to be capable of
6067 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
6068 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
6069 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
6070 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
6071 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
6072 Debian
</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
6073 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
6074 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
6075 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p>
6081 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
6086 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6090 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop
</a>
6096 <p>Here is a short update on my
<a
6097 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
6098 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a>. Here is a summary of the
6099 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
6100 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
6101 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
6102 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#
584861</a> and
6103 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#
585716</a>).
</p>
6105 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
6106 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
6107 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
6108 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
6109 publish the difference.
</p>
6111 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
6114 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
6115 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
6116 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
6117 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
6118 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
6119 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
6120 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
6121 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
6124 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
6127 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
6128 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
6129 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
6130 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
6131 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
6132 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
6133 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
6134 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
6135 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
6136 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
6137 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
6138 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
6139 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
6140 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
6141 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
6142 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
6143 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
6144 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
6145 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
6146 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
6149 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
6152 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
6153 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
6154 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
6155 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
6156 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
6157 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
6158 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
6159 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
6160 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
6161 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
6162 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
6163 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
6164 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
6165 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
6166 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
6167 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
6168 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
6169 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
6170 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
6171 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
6172 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
6175 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
6178 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
6179 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
6180 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
6183 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
6184 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
6185 in git
</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
6186 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
6187 the difference somewhat.
6193 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
6198 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6202 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
6208 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
6209 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
6210 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
6211 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
6212 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA
</a>, which has proved to
6213 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
6214 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
6215 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
6216 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
6217 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p>
6219 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
6220 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
6221 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
6222 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
6225 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
6226 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
6227 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
6228 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi
</a> for that.
</p>
6230 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
6231 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
6233 <p>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
6234 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq
</a> package as a
6235 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
6236 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
6237 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p>
6243 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
6248 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6252 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object
</a>
6259 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
6260 about the fact
</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
6261 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
6262 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p>
6264 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
6265 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
6266 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
6267 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p>
6269 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
6270 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
6271 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
6274 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
6276 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
6277 schema
</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
6278 available today from IETF.
</p>
6281 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
6282 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
6284 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
6286 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
6290 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
6291 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
6294 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
6295 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
6296 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p>
6298 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
6299 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
6305 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
6310 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6314 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output
</a>
6320 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
6321 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
6322 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
6323 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
6324 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
6328 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
6329 tasksel --new-install
6332 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
6333 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
6334 any output what so ever.
6336 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
6337 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
6338 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
6339 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
6340 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
6341 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
6345 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
6346 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
6350 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "
<tt>aptitude -q
6351 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
6352 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
6353 ~pimportant
</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
6354 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
6355 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
6358 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
6359 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
6366 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/nuug
">nuug</a>.
6371 <div class="padding
"></div>
6375 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
6382 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
6383 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
6384 finally made the upgrade logs available from
6385 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
6386 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
6387 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
6388 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
6390 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
6391 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
6392 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
6393 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
6394 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
6395 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
6396 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
6397 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
6399 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
6400 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
6401 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
6404 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
6405 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
6406 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
6407 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
6408 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
6409 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
6410 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
6413 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
6414 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
6415 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
6416 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
6417 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
6418 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
6419 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
6420 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
6421 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
6422 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
6423 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
6424 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
6425 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
6426 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
6427 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
6428 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
6429 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
6430 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
6431 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
6432 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
6433 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
6434 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
6435 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
6436 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
6437 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
6438 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
6439 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
6440 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
6441 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
6442 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
6444 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
6446 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
6447 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
6448 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
6449 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
6450 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
6451 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
6452 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
6453 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
6454 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
6455 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
6456 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
6457 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
6458 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
6459 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
6460 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
6461 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
6462 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
6463 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
6464 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
6465 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
6466 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
6467 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
6468 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
6469 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
6470 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
6471 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
6472 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
6473 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
6474 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
6475 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
6476 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
6479 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
6481 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
6482 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
6483 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
6484 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
6485 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
6486 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
6487 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
6488 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
6489 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
6490 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
6491 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
6492 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
6493 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
6494 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
6495 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
6496 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
6497 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
6498 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
6499 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
6500 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
6501 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
6502 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
6503 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
6504 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
6505 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
6506 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
6507 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
6508 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
6510 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
6511 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
6512 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
6513 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
6514 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
6515 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
6516 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
6517 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
6518 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
6519 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
6520 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
6521 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
6522 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
6523 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
6524 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
6525 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
6526 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
6527 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
6528 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
6529 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
6530 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
6531 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
6532 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
6533 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
6534 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
6535 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
6536 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
6537 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
6538 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
6539 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
6540 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
6541 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
6542 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
6543 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
6544 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
6545 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
6546 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
6554 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian
">debian</a>, <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>.
6559 <div class="padding
"></div>
6563 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
6569 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
6570 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
6571 have been discovered and reported in the process
6572 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
6573 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
6574 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#584861</a> in
6575 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
6576 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
6578 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
6579 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
6580 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
6581 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
6582 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
6583 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
6585 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
6586 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
6587 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
6588 is created. The bug report
6589 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
6590 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
6591 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
6592 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
6593 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
6594 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
6595 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
6596 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
6597 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
6598 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
6599 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
6600 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
6603 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
6604 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
6622 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
6623 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
6625 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
6626 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
6627 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
<<EOF
6631 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
6635 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
6636 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
6637 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
6639 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
6641 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
6642 # to return the correct answers.
6643 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
6644 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
6646 # Include the desktop and laptop task
6647 for test in desktop laptop ; do
6648 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
<<EOF
6652 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
6655 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
6656 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
6657 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
6658 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
6660 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
6661 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
6662 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
6663 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
6667 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
6668 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
6669 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
6670 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
6671 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
6672 kdebase-workspace-data
</p>
6674 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
6675 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
6676 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
6677 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
6678 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
6679 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
6680 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p>
6682 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
6683 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
6684 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
6685 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
6686 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
6693 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
6698 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6702 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it
</a>
6708 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
6709 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
6710 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
6711 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
6712 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
6713 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
6714 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p>
6716 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
6717 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
6726 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
6728 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
6731 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
6735 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
6742 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
6743 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
6744 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p>
6746 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
6747 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
6754 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
6759 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6763 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...
</a>
6770 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
6771 of Rob Weir
</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
6772 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
6773 Standards Wars
</a> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
6774 following the standards wars of today.
</p>
6780 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/standard">standard
</a>.
6785 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6789 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site
</a>
6795 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
6796 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
6797 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
6798 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
6799 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p>
6802 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
6804 Dell Computer Corporation
1
6807 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
6813 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
6814 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
6815 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
6816 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
6817 option to list the individual machines.
</p>
6820 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
6821 city of Narvik
</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
6822 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
6823 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
6824 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
6825 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
6832 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/sitesummary">sitesummary
</a>.
6837 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6841 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?
</a>
6847 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
6848 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
6849 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
6850 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
6853 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
6854 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#
583312</a> initially filed
6855 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
6856 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
6857 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#
524751</a> initially filed against
6858 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p>
6860 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
6861 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
6862 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
6863 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
6864 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
6865 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
6866 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
6867 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p>
6869 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p>
6875 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
6880 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6884 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing
</a>
6890 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
6891 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
6892 issues are known and should be solved:
6896 <li>The wicd package seen to
6897 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting
</a> and
6898 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup
</a> when
6899 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
6900 seem to be on the case.
</li>
6902 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
6903 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition
</a>
6904 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
6905 maintainer is on the case.
</li>
6907 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
6908 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
6909 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back
</a> to
6910 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
6911 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
6912 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
6913 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
6914 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li>
6918 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
6919 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
6920 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
6921 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p>
6923 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
6924 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
6925 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
6926 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
6928 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p>
6934 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
6939 <div class=
"padding"></div>
6943 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</a>
6949 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
6950 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
6951 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
6952 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p>
6954 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
6955 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
6956 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
6957 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
6958 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
6959 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
6960 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
6961 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
6962 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
6963 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
6964 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
6965 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
6966 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
6969 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
6970 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
6971 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
6972 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
6973 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
6974 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
6975 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
6976 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
6977 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
6978 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
6981 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
6982 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
6983 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
6984 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
6985 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
6986 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p>
6988 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
6989 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p>
6995 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
7000 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7004 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable
</a>
7010 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
7011 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
7012 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
7013 expected, if I am to believe the
7014 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
7015 on debian-devel@
</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
7016 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
7017 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
7018 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
7019 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
7022 More information about
7023 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
7024 based boot sequencing
</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
7025 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
7026 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
7032 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
7033 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
7034 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
7035 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
7041 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
7046 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7050 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients
</a>
7056 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
7057 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
7058 system
</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
7059 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
7060 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
7061 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
7062 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
7063 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p>
7065 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
7066 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
7067 this on the collector host:
</p>
7070 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
7073 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
7074 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p>
7076 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
7077 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
7078 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
7079 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
7086 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/sitesummary">sitesummary
</a>.
7091 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7095 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</a>
7101 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
7102 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd
</a>
7104 <a href=
"http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced
</a>
7106 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
7107 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
7108 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart
</a>, and might prove to be
7109 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
7110 based boot system. Tollef is
7111 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process
</a> of getting
7112 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
7113 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
7114 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
7115 at the moment do not.
</p>
7117 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
7118 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
7119 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
7120 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
7121 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
7124 <p>In the mean time, based on the
7125 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
7126 on debian-devel@
</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
7127 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
7128 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
7129 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
7130 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
7131 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
7132 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p>
7138 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
7143 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7147 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing
</a>
7153 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
7154 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
7155 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
7156 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
7157 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
7158 based boot sequencing
</a> is enabled, and add this line to
7159 /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
7162 CONCURRENCY=makefile
7165 <p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
7166 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
7167 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
7168 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
7169 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
7170 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
7171 make this happen.
</p>
7173 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
7174 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
7175 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
7176 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
7177 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p>
7179 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
7180 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
7181 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
7182 fix the remaining issues.
</p>
7184 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
7185 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
7186 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
7187 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
7193 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
7198 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7202 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing
</a>
7208 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
7209 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
7210 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
7211 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
7212 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
7213 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
7214 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p>
7216 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
7217 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
7218 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p>
7224 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
7229 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7233 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development
</a>
7239 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
7240 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
7241 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
7242 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
7243 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
7244 the package up to date.
</p>
7246 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
7247 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
7248 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
7249 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
7250 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
7251 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
7252 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
7253 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah
</a>, and continue
7254 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
7255 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
7256 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
7257 working on the future release.
</p>
7259 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
7260 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p>
7266 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
7271 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7275 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker
</a>
7281 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
7282 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
7283 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
7285 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
7286 gathering
</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
7287 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
7288 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
7289 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
7290 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p>
7292 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
7293 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
7298 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li>
7300 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
7301 clock is in UTC.
</li>
7303 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
7304 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
7305 based boot sequencing
</a>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li>
7309 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
7310 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
7313 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
7314 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
7315 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
7316 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
7317 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
7320 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
7321 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
7322 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
7323 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
7324 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
7325 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
7326 insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p>
7332 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
7337 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7341 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand
</a>
7347 <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
7348 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
7349 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
7350 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
7352 <a href=
"http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
7353 rapport
</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
7354 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
7355 <a href=
"http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
7356 höftade Sverigesiffror
</a>, oppsummeres slik:
</p>
7359 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att
25 procent av all mjukvara i
7360 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
7361 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
7362 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
7365 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er
<a
7366 href=
"http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
7367 piracy figures need a shot of reality
</a> og
<a
7368 href=
"http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
7369 Copyright Treaty Work?
</a></p>
7371 <p>Fant lenkene via
<a
7372 href=
"http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
7373 på Slashdot
</a>.
</p>
7379 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling
</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>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern
</a>.
7384 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7388 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med
21% i
2009</a>
7395 <a href=
"http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
7396 tall
</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet. Fikk meg til
7397 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
7398 jobber til daglig. En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har
490
7399 (
61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og
196
7400 (
25%) windowstjenere, samt
112 (
14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere. Med den
7401 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.
</p>
7407 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</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>.
7412 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7416 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis
</a>
7422 <p><a href=
"http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
7423 IT melder
</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
7424 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
7425 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer. Det er ingen tvil om
7426 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
7427 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
7428 bærbare. Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
7429 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
7430 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
7431 foreningsarbeide. Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
7432 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
7433 av dem. Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
7434 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
7435 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
7436 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker. Jeg har LVM på toppen
7437 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
7438 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare. Kostnaden når
7439 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
7440 betydelige. En bør dog passe på passordet. Hvis det går tapt, må
7441 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.
</p>
7443 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
7444 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
7445 krypteringsnøklene. Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
7446 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten. Jeg tror oddsene for at
7447 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
7448 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
7449 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
7456 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</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>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>.
7461 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7465 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot
</a>
7471 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
7472 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
7473 do not yet know them.
</p>
7475 <p>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/">valgrind
</a>, a
7476 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
7477 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
7478 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
7479 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
7480 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
7481 occurs. It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
7482 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
7483 'using uninitialised value in control logic'. This tool has made it
7484 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
7485 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
7487 <p>The second one is
7488 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity
</a> which is
7489 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
7490 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
7491 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
7492 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
7493 and the company behind it is running
7494 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service
</a> for the
7495 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
7496 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
7497 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
7498 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
7499 Y lines O to P can never be executed'. The projects included in the
7500 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
7501 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p>
7503 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
7504 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
7505 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
7506 surrounded by today.
</p>
7512 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>.
7517 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7521 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch
</a>
7528 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
7529 patch is better than a useless patch
</a>. I completely disagree, as a
7530 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
7531 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
7532 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
7539 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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
7544 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7548 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
</a>
7554 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
7555 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
7556 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
7557 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
7558 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
7559 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
7560 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
7563 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
7564 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
7565 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
7566 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
7567 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
7568 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
7569 blocked from doing so.
</p>
7571 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
7572 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
7573 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
7574 requirements change.
</p>
7576 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
7577 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
7578 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p>
7584 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/nuug">nuug
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard
</a>.
7589 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7593 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</a>
7599 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
7600 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
7601 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
7602 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
7603 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
7604 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
7605 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
7606 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
7607 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
7608 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
7609 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
7610 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
7611 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
7612 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
7619 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/nuug">nuug
</a>.
7624 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7628 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC
2307?
</a>
7634 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
7635 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
7636 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
7637 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
7638 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
7639 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p>
7641 <p>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a>,
7642 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
7643 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
7644 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
7645 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
7646 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
7647 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
7648 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
7649 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
7650 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
7651 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
7652 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
7653 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p>
7655 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
7656 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
7657 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
7658 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p>
7660 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
7661 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p>
7663 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
7664 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
7665 new IETF work group?
</p>
7671 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ldap">ldap
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
7676 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7680 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut
</a>
7686 <p>Endelig er
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a>
7687 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny
</a> gitt ut.
7688 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
7689 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
7690 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
7691 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a> /
7692 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu
</a> ferdig
7693 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
7694 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
7695 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
7696 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
7697 <tt>insserv
</tt>.
</p>
7703 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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>.
7708 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7712 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release
</a>
7718 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
7719 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
7720 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
7721 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
7722 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
7723 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
7724 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
7725 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p>
7727 <p>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
7728 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
7729 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
7730 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
7737 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/ltsp">ltsp
</a>.
7742 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7746 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian
</a>
7752 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
7753 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
7754 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
7755 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
7756 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
7757 notes are available on
7758 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
7759 Debian wiki
</a>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
7760 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
7761 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
7762 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
7763 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
7764 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
7765 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
7766 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p>
7768 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
7769 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p>
7775 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<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/multimedia">multimedia
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
7780 <div class=
"padding"></div>
7782 <p style=
"text-align: right;"><a href=
"debian.rss"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt=
"RSS Feed" width=
"36" height=
"14" /></a></p>
7793 <li><a href=
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2)
</a></li>
7795 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (
3)
</a></li>
7797 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (
8)
</a></li>
7799 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (
3)
</a></li>
7806 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (
11)
</a></li>
7808 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (
9)
</a></li>
7810 <li><a href=
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9)
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7812 <li><a href=
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6)
</a></li>
7814 <li><a href=
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9)
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7816 <li><a href=
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10)
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7818 <li><a href=
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7)
</a></li>
7820 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (
3)
</a></li>
7822 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (
5)
</a></li>
7824 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (
7)
</a></li>
7826 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (
9)
</a></li>
7828 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (
3)
</a></li>
7835 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (
7)
</a></li>
7837 <li><a href=
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10)
</a></li>
7839 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (
17)
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7841 <li><a href=
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12)
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7843 <li><a href=
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12)
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7845 <li><a href=
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20)
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7847 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (
17)
</a></li>
7849 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (
6)
</a></li>
7851 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (
9)
</a></li>
7853 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (
17)
</a></li>
7855 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (
10)
</a></li>
7857 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (
7)
</a></li>
7864 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (
16)
</a></li>
7866 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (
6)
</a></li>
7868 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (
6)
</a></li>
7870 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (
7)
</a></li>
7872 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (
3)
</a></li>
7874 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (
2)
</a></li>
7876 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (
7)
</a></li>
7878 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (
6)
</a></li>
7880 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (
4)
</a></li>
7882 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (
2)
</a></li>
7884 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (
3)
</a></li>
7886 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (
1)
</a></li>
7893 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (
2)
</a></li>
7895 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (
1)
</a></li>
7897 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (
3)
</a></li>
7899 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (
3)
</a></li>
7901 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (
9)
</a></li>
7903 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (
14)
</a></li>
7905 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (
12)
</a></li>
7907 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (
13)
</a></li>
7909 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (
7)
</a></li>
7911 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (
9)
</a></li>
7913 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (
13)
</a></li>
7915 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (
12)
</a></li>
7922 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (
8)
</a></li>
7924 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (
8)
</a></li>
7926 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (
12)
</a></li>
7928 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (
10)
</a></li>
7930 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (
9)
</a></li>
7932 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (
3)
</a></li>
7934 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (
4)
</a></li>
7936 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (
3)
</a></li>
7938 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (
1)
</a></li>
7940 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (
2)
</a></li>
7942 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (
3)
</a></li>
7944 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (
3)
</a></li>
7951 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (
5)
</a></li>
7953 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (
7)
</a></li>
7964 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (
13)
</a></li>
7966 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (
1)
</a></li>
7968 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (
1)
</a></li>
7970 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (
4)
</a></li>
7972 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (
8)
</a></li>
7974 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (
14)
</a></li>
7976 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (
2)
</a></li>
7978 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (
2)
</a></li>
7980 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (
96)
</a></li>
7982 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (
146)
</a></li>
7984 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (
10)
</a></li>
7986 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (
10)
</a></li>
7988 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (
4)
</a></li>
7990 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (
243)
</a></li>
7992 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (
21)
</a></li>
7994 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (
12)
</a></li>
7996 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (
12)
</a></li>
7998 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (
7)
</a></li>
8000 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (
11)
</a></li>
8002 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (
40)
</a></li>
8004 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (
7)
</a></li>
8006 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (
18)
</a></li>
8008 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (
9)
</a></li>
8010 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (
7)
</a></li>
8012 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (
1)
</a></li>
8014 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (
8)
</a></li>
8016 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (
26)
</a></li>
8018 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (
244)
</a></li>
8020 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (
162)
</a></li>
8022 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (
11)
</a></li>
8024 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (
2)
</a></li>
8026 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (
46)
</a></li>
8028 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (
72)
</a></li>
8030 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (
1)
</a></li>
8032 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (
1)
</a></li>
8034 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (
11)
</a></li>
8036 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (
2)
</a></li>
8038 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (
9)
</a></li>
8040 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (
1)
</a></li>
8042 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (
4)
</a></li>
8044 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (
2)
</a></li>
8046 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (
39)
</a></li>
8048 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (
4)
</a></li>
8050 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (
4)
</a></li>
8052 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (
44)
</a></li>
8054 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (
3)
</a></li>
8056 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (
9)
</a></li>
8058 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (
24)
</a></li>
8060 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (
1)
</a></li>
8062 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (
8)
</a></li>
8064 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (
40)
</a></li>
8066 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (
4)
</a></li>
8068 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (
29)
</a></li>
8074 <p style=
"text-align: right">
8075 Created by
<a href=
"http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6
</a>
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