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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html">The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         14th May 2023
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days.  A lot of
  32 patches and issues have seen activity on
  33 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/">the project github
  34 pages</a> recently.  A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering
  35 over at the <a href="https://tormach.com/">Tormach</a> headquarter in
  36 Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway.  If you
  37 wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:</p>
  38
  39 <blockquote>
  40 "LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
  41 machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
  42 cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
  43 joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
  44 several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
  45 interactive development)."
  46 </blockquote>
  47
  48 <p>The Norwegian developer gathering take place the weekend June 16th
  49 to 18th this year, and is open for everyone interested in contributing
  50 to LinuxCNC.  Up to date information about the gathering can be found
  51 in
  52 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/thread/sa64jp06nob.fsf%40hjemme.reinholdtsen.name/#msg37837251">the
  53 developer mailing list thread</a> where the gathering was announced.
  54 Thanks to the good people at
  55 <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>,
  56 <a href="https://www.redpill-linpro.com/">Redpill-Linpro</a> and
  57 <a href="https://www.nuugfoundation.no/no/">NUUG Foundation</a>, we
  58 have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and shelter for the people
  59 traveling from afar to join us.  If you would like to join the
  60 gathering, get in touch.</p>
  61
  62 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  63 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  64 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  65
  66       </div>
  67       <div class="tags">
  68
  69
  70         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>.
  71
  72
  73       </div>
  74     </div>
  75     <div class="padding"></div>
  76
  77     <div class="entry">
  78       <div class="title">
  79         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html">OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time</a>
  80       </div>
  81       <div class="date">
  82         13th May 2023
  83       </div>
  84       <div class="body">
  85         <p>A bit delayed,
  86 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
  87 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> package in Debian now got the
  88 latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm.  Because it depend on a
  89 package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the
  90 testing migration script did not understand that the tests were
  91 actually working, so the migration was delayed.  A bug in the package
  92 dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package
  93 (opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui)
  94 installed by default.  I am very grateful to Gustavo Iñiguez Goya for
  95 his work on getting the package ready for Debian Bookworm.</p>
  96
  97 <p>Armed with this package I have discovered some surprising
  98 connections from programs I believed were able to work completly
  99 offline, and it has already proven its worth, at least to me.  If you
 100 too want to get more familiar with the kind of programs using
 101 Internett connections on your machine, I recommend testing <tt>apt
 102 install opensnitch</tt> in Bookworm and see what you think.</p>
 103
 104 <p>The package is still not able to build its eBPF module within
 105 Debian.  Not sure how much work it would be to get it working, but
 106 suspect some kernel related packages need to be extended with more
 107 header files to get it working.</p>
 108
 109 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 110 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 111 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 112
 113       </div>
 114       <div class="tags">
 115
 116
 117         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
 118
 119
 120       </div>
 121     </div>
 122     <div class="padding"></div>
 123
 124     <div class="entry">
 125       <div class="title">
 126         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html">Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?</a>
 127       </div>
 128       <div class="date">
 129         23rd April 2023
 130       </div>
 131       <div class="body">
 132         <p>While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that
 133 it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with
 134 transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into
 135 stuff I need to write.  The background is that long drives often bring
 136 up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out
 137 of the question while driving.  With the release of
 138 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/">OpenAI Whisper</a>, this
 139 seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a
 140 go.  OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in
 141 audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that
 142 audio recording.  It handle multiple languages and according to its
 143 creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken
 144 one.  I have not tested the latter feature.  It can either use the CPU
 145 or a GPU with CUDA support.  As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice
 146 limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards.  I have few of those, as
 147 they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested
 148 the GPU option.  While looking into the matter, I did discover some
 149 work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with
 150 the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not
 151 spent much time looking into GPU support yet.  I've so far used an old
 152 X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its
 153 CPU.</p>
 154
 155 <p>As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers
 156 under control of someone else (aka a "cloud" service) to transcribe
 157 ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing
 158 system locally on my own computers.  The only sensible approach to me
 159 is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and
 160 to upload the needed packages into Debian.  Looking at Debian Bookworm, I
 161 discovered that only three packages were missing,
 162 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034307">tiktoken</a>,
 163 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034144">triton</a>, and
 164 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034091">openai-whisper</a>.  For a while
 165 I also believed
 166 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034286">ffmpeg-python</a> was
 167 needed, but as its
 168 <a href="https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/760">upstream
 169 seem to have vanished</a> I found it safer
 170 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1242">to rewrite
 171 whisper</a> to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python
 172 into Debian.  I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of
 173 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team">the Debian Deep
 174 Learning Team</a>, which seem like the best team to look after such
 175 packages.  Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware
 176 that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer
 177 versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after
 178 Bookworm is released.</p>
 179
 180 <p>All required code packages have been now waiting in
 181 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the Debian NEW
 182 queue</a> since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until
 183 Bookworm is released.  An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural
 184 network models used by Whisper.  The default behaviour of Whisper is
 185 to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to
 186 <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt> on first invocation.  This obviously would
 187 fail <a href="https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html">the
 188 deserted island test of free software</a> as the Debian packages would
 189 be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar
 190 powered computer on a deserted island.</p>
 191
 192 <p>Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian
 193 mirror system.  This is problematic, as the models are very large
 194 files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror
 195 infrastructure around the globe.  The strain would be even higher if
 196 the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do
 197 not.  The small model, which according to its creator is most useful
 198 for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there
 199 either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB).  The medium model, which to me
 200 seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB)
 201 and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB).  I would assume
 202 everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for
 203 highest quality.  I believe the models themselves would have to go
 204 into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really
 205 including any useful source code for updating the models.  The
 206 "source", aka the model training set, according to the creators
 207 consist of "680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised
 208 data collected from the web", which to me reads material with both
 209 unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public.  In other
 210 words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free
 211 Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free.</p>
 212
 213 <p>I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a
 214 model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it
 215 is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the
 216 archive.  In any case I wrote build rules for a
 217 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/openai-whisper-model">OpenAI
 218 Whisper model package</a> and
 219 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1257">modified the
 220 Whisper code base</a> to prefer shared files under <tt>/usr/</tt> and
 221 <tt>/var/</tt> over user specific files in <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt>
 222 to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such
 223 possibility.  One solution might be to include only one of the models
 224 (small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to
 225 download the others from the Internet.  Not quite sure what to do
 226 here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list).</p>
 227
 228 <p>To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to
 229 clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm.  I
 230 selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter
 231 would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are
 232 missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want
 233 to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running.</p>
 234
 235 <p>Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI
 236 Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation,
 237 first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys,
 238 then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages
 239 and one of the models:</p>
 240
 241 <p><pre>
 242 curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
 243   -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
 244 mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
 245 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list &lt;&lt;EOF
 246 deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
 247 deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
 248 EOF
 249 apt update
 250 apt install openai-whisper
 251 </pre></p>
 252
 253 <p>The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other
 254 computer than my own.  With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe
 255 a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small
 256 model.  This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM.  Transcribing
 257 the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes
 258 using around 5.2 GiB of RAM.  My test machine had too little memory to
 259 test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM.  In
 260 short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will
 261 for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian.</p>
 262
 263 <p>Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.</p>
 264
 265 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 266 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 267 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 268
 269       </div>
 270       <div class="tags">
 271
 272
 273         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 274
 275
 276       </div>
 277     </div>
 278     <div class="padding"></div>
 279
 280     <div class="entry">
 281       <div class="title">
 282         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html">rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux  - nice free software</a>
 283       </div>
 284       <div class="date">
 285          7th April 2023
 286       </div>
 287       <div class="body">
 288         <p>Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency
 289 scanner for my software defined radio.  Just for fun I tried to locate
 290 the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all
 291 the frequencies to see what is in use.  I've tried to find a useful
 292 program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful
 293 tool.  This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I
 294 found a description of
 295 <a href="https://www.kali.org/tools/rtlsdr-scanner/">rtlsdr-scanner
 296 over at the Kali site</a>, and was able to track down
 297 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/rtlsdr-scanner.git">the
 298 Kali package git repository</a> to build a deb package for the
 299 scanner.  Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself,
 300 at least in Debian Bullseye.  Two runtime dependencies,
 301 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-visvis.git">python-visvis</a>
 302 and
 303 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-rtlsdr.git">python-rtlsdr</a>
 304 had to be built and installed separately.  Luckily '<tt>gbp
 305 buildpackage</tt>' handled them just fine and no further packages had
 306 to be manually built.  The end result worked out of the box after
 307 installation.</p>
 308
 309 <p>My initial scans for FM channels worked just fine, so I knew the
 310 scanner was functioning.  But when I tried to scan every frequency
 311 from 100 to 1000 MHz, the program stopped unexpectedly near the
 312 completion.  After some debugging I discovered USB software radio I
 313 used rejected frequencies above 948 MHz, triggering a unreported
 314 exception breaking the scan.  Changing the scan to end at 957 worked
 315 better.  I similarly found the lower limit to be around 15, and ended
 316 up with the following full scan:</p>
 317
 318 <p><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png"><img src="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png" width="100%"></a></p>
 319
 320 <p>Saving the scan did not work, but exporting it as a CSV file worked
 321 just fine.  I ended up with around 477k CVS lines with dB level for
 322 the given frequency.</p>
 323
 324 <p>The save failure seem to be a missing UTF-8 encoding issue in the
 325 python code.  Will see if I can find time to send a patch
 326 <a href="https://github.com/CdeMills/RTLSDR-Scanner/">upstream</a>
 327 later to fix this exception:</p>
 328
 329 <pre>
 330 Traceback (most recent call last):
 331   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
 332     save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
 333   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
 334     handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
 335 TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
 336 Traceback (most recent call last):
 337   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
 338     save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
 339   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
 340     handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
 341 TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
 342 </pre>
 343
 344 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 345 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 346 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 347
 348       </div>
 349       <div class="tags">
 350
 351
 352         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
 353
 354
 355       </div>
 356     </div>
 357     <div class="padding"></div>
 358
 359     <div class="entry">
 360       <div class="title">
 361         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html">OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm</a>
 362       </div>
 363       <div class="date">
 364         25th February 2023
 365       </div>
 366       <div class="body">
 367         <p>Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo
 368 Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload,
 369 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
 370 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> is now available in Debian
 371 Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.</p>
 372
 373 <p>This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more
 374 machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will
 375 ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local
 376 network or the Internet.  If some background daemon is trying to dial
 377 home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by
 378 default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop
 379 up.  A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided
 380 in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs
 381 use the network.</p>
 382
 383 <p>OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I
 384 had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the
 385 package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick
 386 at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about
 387 week after the first upload.  It is now team maintained under the Go
 388 language team umbrella.  A few fixes to the default setup is only in
 389 Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week.</p>
 390
 391 <p>During testing I ran into an
 392 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/813">issue
 393 with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing</a>, which was quickly
 394 resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration
 395 change.  I've been told this was caused by the Debian packages default
 396 use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the
 397 newer eBPF module that can be used.  The reason is simply that
 398 upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for
 399 OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree,
 400 which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in
 401 Debian.  We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers
 402 package.  It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to
 403 build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full
 404 kernel source.</p>
 405
 406 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 407 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 408 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 409
 410       </div>
 411       <div class="tags">
 412
 413
 414         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
 415
 416
 417       </div>
 418     </div>
 419     <div class="padding"></div>
 420
 421     <div class="entry">
 422       <div class="title">
 423         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html">Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?</a>
 424       </div>
 425       <div class="date">
 426         29th January 2023
 427       </div>
 428       <div class="body">
 429         <p>Linux desktop systems
 430 <a href="https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html">have
 431 standardized</a> how programs present themselves to the desktop
 432 system.  If a package include a .desktop file in
 433 /usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop
 434 environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the
 435 menu of available programs in the system.  A lesser known fact is that
 436 a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the
 437 files created by the program in question, and use it to open these
 438 files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.</p>
 439
 440 <p>A while back I ran into a package that did not tell the desktop
 441 system how to recognize its files and was not used to open its files
 442 in the file browser and fixed it.  In the process I wrote a simple
 443 debian/tests/ script to ensure the setup keep working.  It might be
 444 useful for other packages too, to ensure any future version of the
 445 package keep handling its own files.</p>
 446
 447 <p>For this to work the file format need a useful MIME type that can
 448 be used to identify the format.  If the file format do not yet have a
 449 MIME type, it should define one and preferably also
 450 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">register
 451 it with IANA</a> to ensure the MIME type string is reserved.</p>
 452
 453 <p>The script uses the <tt>xdg-mime</tt> program from xdg-utils to
 454 query the database of standardized package information and ensure it
 455 return sensible values.  It also need the location of an example file
 456 for xdg-mime to guess the format of.</p>
 457
 458 <pre>
 459 #!/bin/sh
 460 #
 461 # Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
 462 # License: GPL v2 or later at your choice.
 463 #
 464 # Validate the MIME setup, making sure motor types have
 465 # application/vnd.openmotor+yaml associated with them and is connected
 466 # to the openmotor desktop file.
 467
 468 retval=0
 469
 470 mimetype="application/vnd.openmotor+yaml"
 471 testfile="test/data/real/o3100/motor.ric"
 472 mydesktopfile="openmotor.desktop"
 473
 474 filemime="$(xdg-mime query filetype "$testfile")"
 475
 476 if [ "$mimetype" != "$filemime" ] ; then
 477     retval=1
 478     echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file MIME type is $filemine, not $mimetype"
 479 else
 480     echo "success: xdg-mime report correct mime type $mimetype for motor file"
 481 fi
 482
 483 desktop=$(xdg-mime query default "$mimetype")
 484
 485 if [ "$mydesktopfile" != "$desktop" ]; then
 486     retval=1
 487     echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file should be handled by $desktop, not $mydesktopfile"
 488 else
 489     echo "success: xdg-mime agree motor file should be handled by $mydesktopfile"
 490 fi
 491
 492 exit $retval
 493 </pre>
 494
 495 <p>It is a simple way to ensure your users are not very surprised when
 496 they try to open one of your file formats in their file browser.</p>
 497
 498 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 499 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 500 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 501
 502       </div>
 503       <div class="tags">
 504
 505
 506         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 507
 508
 509       </div>
 510     </div>
 511     <div class="padding"></div>
 512
 513     <div class="entry">
 514       <div class="title">
 515         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opensnitch__the_application_level_interactive_firewall__heading_into_the_Debian_archive.html">Opensnitch, the application level interactive firewall, heading into the Debian archive</a>
 516       </div>
 517       <div class="date">
 518         22nd January 2023
 519       </div>
 520       <div class="body">
 521         <p>While reading a
 522 <a href="https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/">blog
 523 post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and
 524 reporting information about them to Apple</a>, even on a machine where
 525 all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a
 526 description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X.  It seemed
 527 like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if
 528 something similar was available for Linux.</p>
 529
 530 <p>It did not take long to find
 531 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch">the OpenSnitch
 532 package</a>, which has been in development since 2017, and now is in
 533 version 1.5.0.  It has had a
 534 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/909567">request for Debian
 535 packaging</a> since 2018, but no-one completed the job so far.  Just
 536 for fun, I decided to see if I could help, and I was very happy to
 537 discover that
 538 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/304">upstream
 539 want a Debian package too</a>.</p>
 540
 541 <p>After struggling a bit with getting the program to run, figuring
 542 out building Go programs (and a little failed detour to look at eBPF
 543 builds too - help needed), I am very happy to report that I am
 544 sponsoring upstream to maintain the package in Debian, and it has
 545 since this morning been waiting in NEW for the ftpmasters to have a
 546 look.  Perhaps it can get into the archive in time for the Bookworm
 547 release?</p>
 548
 549 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 550 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 551 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 552
 553       </div>
 554       <div class="tags">
 555
 556
 557         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
 558
 559
 560       </div>
 561     </div>
 562     <div class="padding"></div>
 563
 564     <div class="entry">
 565       <div class="title">
 566         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_MQTT_publisher_component.html">LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component</a>
 567       </div>
 568       <div class="date">
 569          8th January 2023
 570       </div>
 571       <div class="body">
 572         <p>I watched <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jmKUV3aNLjk">a 2015
 573 video from Andreas Schiffler</a> the other day, where he set up
 574 <a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">LinuxCNC</a> to send status
 575 information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix.  As I also use MQTT for
 576 graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component
 577 would be useful and I set out to implement it.  Today I got the first
 578 draft limping along and submitted as
 579 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/2253">a patch to the
 580 LinuxCNC project</a>.</p>
 581
 582 <p>The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python.
 583 I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT
 584 broker, so I could reuse that code.  Writing a LinuxCNC component in
 585 Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code
 586 repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight
 587 forward.  The hardest part was creating a automated test for the
 588 component to ensure it was working.  Testing it in a simulated
 589 LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed
 590 that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to
 591 make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker
 592 available.</p>
 593
 594 <p>The draft is ready and working, but I am unsure which LinuxCNC HAL
 595 pins I should collect and publish by default (in other words, the
 596 default set of information pieces published), and how to get the
 597 machine name from the LinuxCNC INI file.  The latter is a minor
 598 detail, but I expect it would be useful in a setup with several
 599 machines available.  I am hoping for feedback from the experienced
 600 LinuxCNC developers and users, to make the component even better
 601 before it can go into the mainland LinuxCNC code base.</p>
 602
 603 <p>Since I started on the MQTT component, I came across
 604 <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Bqa2grG0XtA">another video from Kent
 605 VanderVelden</a> where he combine LinuxCNC with a set of screen glasses
 606 controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it occured to me that it would
 607 be useful for such use cases if LinuxCNC also provided a REST API for
 608 querying its status.  I hope to start on such component once the MQTT
 609 component is working well.</p>
 610
 611 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 612 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 613 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 614
 615       </div>
 616       <div class="tags">
 617
 618
 619         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
 620
 621
 622       </div>
 623     </div>
 624     <div class="padding"></div>
 625
 626     <div class="entry">
 627       <div class="title">
 628         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ONVIF_IP_camera_management_tool_finally_in_Debian.html">ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian</a>
 629       </div>
 630       <div class="date">
 631         24th December 2022
 632       </div>
 633       <div class="body">
 634         <p>Merry Christmas to you all.  Here is a small gift to all those with
 635 IP cameras following the <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">ONVIF
 636 specification</a>.  There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
 637 in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras.  After working with upstream for
 638 a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
 639 the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/libonvif">libonvif package</a>
 640 entered Debian Sid last night.</p>
 641
 642 <p>The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
 643 command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
 644 cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as
 645 preview the video from the camera.  Libonvif is available on Both
 646 Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library.  The main
 647 competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed.
 648 I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras
 649 using a free software system provided by Debian.  But the ONVIF world
 650 is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to
 651 follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration
 652 values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the
 653 time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while
 654 before it completely work with your camera.  Upstream seem eager to
 655 improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just <a
 656 href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">a bug report away</a>.</p>
 657
 658 <p>The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload
 659 before it can enter testing.  This will happen in the next few
 660 days.</p>
 661
 662 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 663 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 664 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 665
 666       </div>
 667       <div class="tags">
 668
 669
 670         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 671
 672
 673       </div>
 674     </div>
 675     <div class="padding"></div>
 676
 677     <div class="entry">
 678       <div class="title">
 679         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html">Managing and using ONVIF IP cameras with Linux</a>
 680       </div>
 681       <div class="date">
 682         19th October 2022
 683       </div>
 684       <div class="body">
 685         <p>Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data
 686 from a handful IP cameras using Linux.  I both wanted to change their
 687 settings and to make their imagery available via a free software
 688 service under my control.  Here is a summary of the tools I found.</p>
 689
 690 <p>First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols.  As far as
 691 I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their
 692 internal web server seem to only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer
 693 with some proprietary binary plugin, which in these days of course is
 694 a security disaster and also made it impossible for me to use the
 695 camera web interface.  Luckily I discovered that the SOAP looking
 696 protocol is actually following <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">the
 697 ONVIF specification</a>, which seem to be supported by a lot of IP
 698 cameras these days.</p>
 699
 700 <p>Once the protocol was identified, I was able to find what appear to
 701 be the most popular way to configure ONVIF cameras, the free software
 702 Windows tool named
 703 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/">ONVIF Device
 704 Manager</a>.  Lacking any other options at the time, I tried
 705 unsuccessfully to get it running using Wine, but was missing a dotnet
 706 40 library and I found no way around it to run it on Linux.</p>
 707
 708 <p>The next tool I found to configure the cameras were a non-free Linux Qt
 709 client <a href="https://www.lingodigit.com/onvif_nvcdemo.html">ONVIF
 710 Device Tool</a>.  I did not like its terms of use, so did not spend
 711 much time on it.</p>
 712
 713 <p>To collect the video and make it available in a web interface, I
 714 found the Zoneminder tool in Debian.  A recent version was able to
 715 automatically detect and configure ONVIF devices, so I could use it to
 716 set up motion detection in and collection of the camera output.  I had
 717 initial problems getting the ONVIF autodetection to work, as both
 718 Firefox and Chromium <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1001188">refused
 719 the inter-tab communication</a> being used by the Zoneminder web
 720 pages, but managed to get konqueror to work.  Apparently the "Enhanced
 721 Tracking Protection" in Firefox cause the problem.  I ended up
 722 upgrading to the Bookworm edition of Zoneminder in the process to try
 723 to fix the issue, and believe the problem might be solved now.</p>
 724
 725 <p>In the process I came across the nice Linux GUI tool
 726 <a href="https://gitlab.com/caspermeijn/onvifviewer/">ONVIF Viewer</a>
 727 allowing me to preview the camera output and validate the login
 728 passwords required.  Sadly its author has grown tired of maintaining
 729 the software, so it might not see any future updates.  Which is sad,
 730 as the viewer is sightly unstable and the picture tend to lock up.
 731 Note, this lockup might be due to limitations in the cameras and not
 732 the viewer implementation.  I suspect the camera is only able to
 733 provide pictures to one client at the time, and the Zoneminder feed
 734 might interfere with the GUI viewer.  I have
 735 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1000820">asked for the tool to be
 736 included in Debian</a>.</p>
 737
 738 <p>Finally, I found what appear to be very nice Linux free software
 739 replacement for the Windows tool, named
 740 <a href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">libonvif</a>.  It
 741 provide a C library to talk to ONVIF devices as well as a command line
 742 and GUI tool using the library.  Using the GUI tool I was able to change
 743 the admin passwords and update other settings of the cameras.  I have
 744 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1021980">asked for the package to be
 745 included in Debian</a>.</p>
 746
 747 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 748 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 749 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 750
 751 <p><strong>Update 2022-10-20</strong>: Since my initial publication of
 752 this text, I got several suggestions for more free software Linux
 753 tools.  There is <a href="https://github.com/quatanium/python-onvif">a
 754 ONVIF python library</a> (already
 755 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/824240">requested into Debian</a>) and
 756 <a href="https://github.com/FalkTannhaeuser/python-onvif-zeep">a python 3
 757 fork</a> using a different SOAP dependency.  There is also
 758 <a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onvif/">support for
 759 ONVIF in Home Assistant</a>, and there is an alternative to Zoneminder
 760 called <a href="https://www.shinobi.video/">Shinobi</a>.  The latter
 761 two are not included in Debian either.  I have not tested any of these
 762 so far.</p>
 763
 764       </div>
 765       <div class="tags">
 766
 767
 768         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 769
 770
 771       </div>
 772     </div>
 773     <div class="padding"></div>
 774
 775     <div class="entry">
 776       <div class="title">
 777         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
 778       </div>
 779       <div class="date">
 780         12th September 2022
 781       </div>
 782       <div class="body">
 783         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
 784
 785 <p>(The picture is of the previous edition.)</p>
 786
 787 <p>Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
 788 the "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
 789 Handbook</a>" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared.  The
 790 english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
 791 translations.  Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
 792 way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
 793 edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%.  The
 794 complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has
 795 been published in several languages over the years.  The translations
 796 are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue.  The
 797 last time I checked, it complete text was available in English,
 798 Norwegian Bokmål, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish.
 799 In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan,
 800 Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
 801 Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish,
 802 Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.</p>
 803
 804 <p>The translation is conducted on
 805 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
 806 hosted weblate project page</a>.  Prospective translators are
 807 recommeded to subscribe to
 808 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
 809 translators mailing list</a> and should also check out
 810 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
 811 contributors</a>.</p>
 812
 813 <p>I am one of the Norwegian Bokmål translators of this book, and we
 814 have just started.  Your contribution is most welcome.</p>
 815
 816 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 817 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 818 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 819
 820       </div>
 821       <div class="tags">
 822
 823
 824         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 825
 826
 827       </div>
 828     </div>
 829     <div class="padding"></div>
 830
 831     <div class="entry">
 832       <div class="title">
 833         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html">Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?</a>
 834       </div>
 835       <div class="date">
 836         16th July 2022
 837       </div>
 838       <div class="body">
 839         <p>While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
 840 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>
 841 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller">PID
 842 controller</a>, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
 843 that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is.  It
 844 proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
 845 in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
 846 and Y to move accurately and reliably.  But while climbing up this
 847 rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
 848 systems are able to tune their PID controllers.  I got the impression
 849 from the documentation that LinuxCNC were not.  This proved to be not
 850 true.</p>
 851
 852 <p>The LinuxCNC
 853 <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/pid.9.html">pid
 854 component</a> is the recommended PID controller to use.  It uses eight
 855 constants <tt>Pgain</tt>, <tt>Igain</tt>, <tt>Dgain</tt>,
 856 <tt>bias</tt>, <tt>FF0</tt>, <tt>FF1</tt>, <tt>FF2</tt> and
 857 <tt>FF3</tt> to calculate the output value based on current and wanted
 858 state, and all of these need to have a sensible value for the
 859 controller to behave properly.  Note, there are even more values
 860 involved, theser are just the most important ones.  In my case I need
 861 the X, Y and Z axes to follow the requested path with little error.
 862 This has proved quite a challenge for someone who have never tuned a
 863 PID controller before, but there is at least some help to be found.
 864
 865 <p>I discovered that included in LinuxCNC was this old PID component
 866 at_pid claiming to have auto tuning capabilities.  Sadly it had been
 867 neglected since 2011, and could not be used as a plug in replacement
 868 for the default pid component.  One would have to rewriting the
 869 LinuxCNC HAL setup to test at_pid.  This was rather sad, when I wanted
 870 to quickly test auto tuning to see if it did a better job than me at
 871 figuring out good P, I and D values to use.</p>
 872
 873 <p>I decided to have a look if the situation could be improved.  This
 874 involved trying to understand the code and history of the pid and
 875 at_pid components.  Apparently they had a common ancestor, as code
 876 structure, comments and variable names were quite close to each other.
 877 Sadly this was not reflected in the git history, making it hard to
 878 figure out what really happened.  My guess is that the author of
 879 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/at_pid.c">at_pid.c</a>
 880 took a version of
 881 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/pid.c">pid.c</a>,
 882 rewrote it to follow the structure he wished pid.c to have, then added
 883 support for auto tuning and finally got it included into the LinuxCNC
 884 repository.  The restructuring and lack of early history made it
 885 harder to figure out which part of the code were relevant to the auto
 886 tuning, and which part of the code needed to be updated to work the
 887 same way as the current pid.c implementation.  I started by trying to
 888 isolate relevant changes in pid.c, and applying them to at_pid.c.  My
 889 aim was to make sure the at_pid component could replace the pid
 890 component with a simple change in the HAL setup loadrt line, without
 891 having to "rewire" the rest of the HAL configuration.  After a few
 892 hours following this approach, I had learned quite a lot about the
 893 code structure of both components, while concluding I was heading down
 894 the wrong rabbit hole, and should get back to the surface and find a
 895 different path.</p>
 896
 897 <p>For the second attempt, I decided to throw away all the PID control
 898 related part of the original at_pid.c, and instead isolate and lift
 899 the auto tuning part of the code and inject it into a copy of pid.c.
 900 This ensured compatibility with the current pid component, while
 901 adding auto tuning as a run time option.  To make it easier to identify
 902 the relevant parts in the future, I wrapped all the auto tuning code
 903 with '#ifdef AUTO_TUNER'.  The end result behave just like the current
 904 pid component by default, as that part of the code is identical.  The
 905 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/1820">end result
 906 entered the LinuxCNC master branch</a> a few days ago.</p>
 907
 908 <p>To enable auto tuning, one need to set a few HAL pins in the PID
 909 component.  The most important ones are <tt>tune-effort</tt>,
 910 <tt>tune-mode</tt> and <tt>tune-start</tt>.  But lets take a step
 911 back, and see what the auto tuning code will do.  I do not know the
 912 mathematical foundation of the at_pid algorithm, but from observation
 913 I can tell that the algorithm will, when enabled, produce a square
 914 wave pattern centered around the <tt>bias</tt> value on the output pin
 915 of the PID controller.  This can be seen using the HAL Scope provided
 916 by LinuxCNC.  In my case, this is translated into voltage (+-10V) sent
 917 to the motor controller, which in turn is translated into motor speed.
 918 So at_pid will ask the motor to move the axis back and forth.  The
 919 number of cycles in the pattern is controlled by the
 920 <tt>tune-cycles</tt> pin, and the extremes of the wave pattern is
 921 controlled by the <tt>tune-effort</tt> pin.  Of course, trying to
 922 change the direction of a physical object instantly (as in going
 923 directly from a positive voltage to the equivalent negative voltage)
 924 do not change velocity instantly, and it take some time for the object
 925 to slow down and move in the opposite direction.  This result in a
 926 more smooth movement wave form, as the axis in question were vibrating
 927 back and forth.  When the axis reached the target speed in the
 928 opposing direction, the auto tuner change direction again.  After
 929 several of these changes, the average time delay between the 'peaks'
 930 and 'valleys' of this movement graph is then used to calculate
 931 proposed values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain, and insert them into the
 932 HAL model to use by the pid controller.  The auto tuned settings are
 933 not great, but htye work a lot better than the values I had been able
 934 to cook up on my own, at least for the horizontal X and Y axis.  But I
 935 had to use very small <tt>tune-effort<tt> values, as my motor
 936 controllers error out if the voltage change too quickly.  I've been
 937 less lucky with the Z axis, which is moving a heavy object up and
 938 down, and seem to confuse the algorithm.  The Z axis movement became a
 939 lot better when I introduced a <tt>bias</tt> value to counter the
 940 gravitational drag, but I will have to work a lot more on the Z axis
 941 PID values.</p>
 942
 943 <p>Armed with this knowledge, it is time to look at how to do the
 944 tuning.  Lets say the HAL configuration in question load the PID
 945 component for X, Y and Z like this:</p>
 946
 947 <blockquote><pre>
 948 loadrt pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
 949 </pre></blockquote>
 950
 951 <p>Armed with the new and improved at_pid component, the new line will
 952 look like this:</p>
 953
 954 <blockquote><pre>
 955 loadrt at_pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
 956 </pre></blockquote>
 957
 958 <p>The rest of the HAL setup can stay the same.  This work because the
 959 components are referenced by name.  If the component had used count=3
 960 instead, all use of pid.# had to be changed to at_pid.#.</p>
 961
 962 <p>To start tuning the X axis, move the axis to the middle of its
 963 range, to make sure it do not hit anything when it start moving back
 964 and forth.  Next, set the <tt>tune-effort</tt> to a low number in the
 965 output range.  I used 0.1 as my initial value.  Next, assign 1 to the
 966 <tt>tune-mode</tt> value. Note, this will disable the pid controlling
 967 part and feed 0 to the output pin, which in my case initially caused a
 968 lot of drift.  In my case it proved to be a good idea with X and Y to
 969 tune the motor driver to make sure 0 voltage stopped the motor
 970 rotation.  On the other hand, for the Z axis this proved to be a bad
 971 idea, so it will depend on your setup.  It might help to set the
 972 <tt>bias</tt> value to a output value that reduce or eliminate the
 973 axis drift.  Finally, after setting <tt>tune-mode</tt>, set
 974 <tt>tune-start</tt> to 1 to activate the auto tuning.  If all go well,
 975 your axis will vibrate for a few seconds and when it is done, new
 976 values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain will be active.  To test them,
 977 change <tt>tune-mode</tt> back to 0.  Note that this might cause the
 978 machine to suddenly jerk as it bring the axis back to its commanded
 979 position, which it might have drifted away from during tuning.  To
 980 summarize with some halcmd lines:</p>
 981
 982 <blockquote><pre>
 983 setp pid.x.tune-effort 0.1
 984 setp pid.x.tune-mode 1
 985 setp pid.x.tune-start 1
 986 # wait for the tuning to complete
 987 setp pid.x.tune-mode 0
 988 </pre></blockquote>
 989
 990 <p>After doing this task quite a few times while trying to figure out
 991 how to properly tune the PID controllers on the machine in, I decided
 992 to figure out if this process could be automated, and wrote a script
 993 to do the entire tuning process from power on.  The end result will
 994 ensure the machine is powered on and ready to run, home all axis if it
 995 is not already done, check that the extra tuning pins are available,
 996 move the axis to its mid point, run the auto tuning and re-enable the
 997 pid controller when it is done.  It can be run several times.  Check
 998 out the
 999 <a href="https://github.com/SebKuzminsky/MazakVQC1540/blob/bon-dev/scripts/run-auto-pid-tuner">run-auto-pid-tuner</a>
1000 script on github if you want to learn how it is done.</p>
1001
1002 <p>My hope is that this little adventure can inspire someone who know
1003 more about motor PID controller tuning can implement even better
1004 algorithms for automatic PID tuning in LinuxCNC, making life easier
1005 for both me and all the others that want to use LinuxCNC but lack the
1006 in depth knowledge needed to tune PID controllers well.</p>
1007
1008 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1009 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1010 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1011
1012       </div>
1013       <div class="tags">
1014
1015
1016         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1017
1018
1019       </div>
1020     </div>
1021     <div class="padding"></div>
1022
1023     <div class="entry">
1024       <div class="title">
1025         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html">LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier</a>
1026       </div>
1027       <div class="date">
1028          3rd June 2022
1029       </div>
1030       <div class="body">
1031         <p>Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
1032 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a> system, I
1033 proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
1034 translators.  The original system consisted of independently written
1035 documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
1036 changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
1037 know how much was left to translated.  By using
1038 <a href="https://po4a.org/">the po4a system</a> to generate POT and PO
1039 files from the English documentation, this can be improved.  A small
1040 team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour
1041 finally payed off.  Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to
1042 translate <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/linuxcnc/">the
1043 LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate</a>, alongside the program itself.</p>
1044
1045 <p>The effort to migrate the documentation to use po4a has been both
1046 slow and frustrating.  I am very happy we finally made it.</p>
1047
1048 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1049 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1050 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1051
1052       </div>
1053       <div class="tags">
1054
1055
1056         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1057
1058
1059       </div>
1060     </div>
1061     <div class="padding"></div>
1062
1063     <div class="entry">
1064       <div class="title">
1065         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html">geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze</a>
1066       </div>
1067       <div class="date">
1068         20th April 2022
1069       </div>
1070       <div class="body">
1071         <p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
1072 located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
1073 not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
1074 information that I would like).  The
1075 <a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
1076 from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
1077 when all I got available is a USB memory stick.  I tried booting the
1078 ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work.  But genisoimage came to
1079 the rescue.</p>
1080
1081 <P>The geteltorito program in
1082 <a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
1083 package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
1084 USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
1085 to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
1086
1087 <blockquote><pre>
1088 geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
1089 sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
1090 </pre></blockquote>
1091
1092 <p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
1093 minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>
1094
1095       </div>
1096       <div class="tags">
1097
1098
1099         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1100
1101
1102       </div>
1103     </div>
1104     <div class="padding"></div>
1105
1106     <div class="entry">
1107       <div class="title">
1108         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html">Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?</a>
1109       </div>
1110       <div class="date">
1111          2nd March 2022
1112       </div>
1113       <div class="body">
1114         <p>After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
1115 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>, the
1116 system was accepted Sunday
1117 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linuxcnc">into Debian</a>.
1118 Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
1119 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=linuxcnc">its
1120 popularity-contest numbers</a> that people have been reporting its use
1121 since 2012.  <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/">Its project site</a> might
1122 be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
1123 via Tor.</p>
1124
1125 <p>But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering?  Perhaps a
1126 Wikipedia quote is in place?</p>
1127
1128 <blockquote>
1129 "LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
1130 machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
1131 cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
1132 joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
1133 several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
1134 interactive development)."
1135 </blockquote>
1136
1137 <p>It can even control 3D printers.  And even though the Wikipedia
1138 page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel
1139 features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features
1140 provided by the Debian kernel.
1141 <a href="https://github.com/linuxcnc/linuxcnc">The source code</a> is
1142 available from Github.  The last few months I've been involved in the
1143 translation setup for the program and documentation.  Translators are
1144 most welcome to
1145 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/linuxcnc/">join the
1146 effort</a> using Weblate.</p>
1147
1148 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1149 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1150 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1151
1152       </div>
1153       <div class="tags">
1154
1155
1156         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1157
1158
1159       </div>
1160     </div>
1161     <div class="padding"></div>
1162
1163     <div class="entry">
1164       <div class="title">
1165         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_still_an_excellent_choice_for_Lego_builders.html">Debian still an excellent choice for Lego builders</a>
1166       </div>
1167       <div class="date">
1168         24th October 2021
1169       </div>
1170       <div class="body">
1171         <p>The Debian Lego team saw a lot of activity the last few weeks.  All
1172 the packages under the team umbrella has been updated to fix
1173 packaging, lintian issues and BTS reports.  In addition, a new and
1174 inspiring team member appeared on both the
1175 <a href="https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-lego-team">debian-lego-team
1176 Team mailing list</a> and
1177 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC channel
1178 #debian-lego</a>.  If you are interested in Lego CAD design and LEGO
1179 Mindstorms programming, check out the
1180 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">team wiki page</a> to
1181 see what Debian can offer the Lego enthusiast.</p>
1182
1183 <p>Patches has been sent upstream, causing new upstream releases, one
1184 even the first one in more than ten years, and old upstreams was
1185 released with new ones.  There are still a lot of work left, and the
1186 team welcome more members to help us make sure Debian is the Linux
1187 distribution of choice for Lego builders.  If you want to contribute,
1188 join us in the IRC channel and become part of
1189 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/debian-lego-team/">the team on
1190 Salsa</a>.</p>
1191
1192 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1193 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1194 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1195
1196       </div>
1197       <div class="tags">
1198
1199
1200         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1201
1202
1203       </div>
1204     </div>
1205     <div class="padding"></div>
1206
1207     <div class="entry">
1208       <div class="title">
1209         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Six_complete_translations_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_for_Buster.html">Six complete translations of The Debian Administrator's Handbook for Buster</a>
1210       </div>
1211       <div class="date">
1212          5th July 2021
1213       </div>
1214       <div class="body">
1215         <p>I am happy observe that the <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The
1216 Debian Administrator's Handbook</a> is available in six languages now.
1217 I am not sure which one of these are completely proof read, but the
1218 complete book is available in these languages:
1219
1220 <ul>
1221
1222 <li>English</li>
1223 <li>Norwegian Bokmål</li>
1224 <li>German</li>
1225 <li>Indonesian</li>
1226 <li>Brazil Portuguese</li>
1227 <li>Spanish</li>
1228
1229 </ul>
1230
1231 <p>This is the list of languages more than 70% complete, in other
1232 words with not too much left to do:</p>
1233
1234 <ul>
1235
1236 <li>Chinese (Simplified) - 90%</li>
1237 <li>French - 79%</li>
1238 <li>Italian - 79%</li>
1239 <li>Japanese - 77%</li>
1240 <li>Arabic (Morocco) - 75%</li>
1241 <li>Persian - 71%</li>
1242
1243 </ul>
1244
1245 <p>I wonder how long it will take to bring these to 100%.</p>
1246
1247 <p>Then there is the list of languages about halfway done:</p>
1248
1249 <ul>
1250
1251 <li>Russian - 63%</li>
1252 <li>Swedish - 53%</li>
1253 <li>Chinese (Traditional) - 46%</li>
1254 <li>Catalan - 45%</li>
1255
1256 </ul>
1257
1258 <p>Several are on to a good start:</p>
1259
1260 <ul>
1261
1262 <li>Dutch - 26%</li>
1263 <li>Vietnamese - 25%</li>
1264 <li>Polish - 23%</li>
1265 <li>Czech - 22%</li>
1266 <li>Turkish - 18%</li>
1267
1268 </ul>
1269
1270 <p>Finally, there are the ones just getting started:</p>
1271
1272 <ul>
1273
1274 <li>Korean - 4%</li>
1275 <li>Croatian - 2%</li>
1276 <li>Greek - 2%</li>
1277 <li>Danish - 1%</li>
1278 <li>Romanian - 1%</li>
1279
1280 </ul>
1281
1282 <p>If you want to help provide a Debian instruction book in your own
1283 language, visit
1284 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/#languages">Weblate</a>
1285 to contribute to the translations.</p>
1286
1287 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1288 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1289 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1290
1291       </div>
1292       <div class="tags">
1293
1294
1295         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1296
1297
1298       </div>
1299     </div>
1300     <div class="padding"></div>
1301
1302     <div class="entry">
1303       <div class="title">
1304         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Latest_Jami_back_in_Debian_Testing__and_scriptable_using_dbus.html">Latest Jami back in Debian Testing, and scriptable using dbus</a>
1305       </div>
1306       <div class="date">
1307         12th January 2021
1308       </div>
1309       <div class="body">
1310         <p>After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and
1311 others, the decentralized communication platform
1312 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>
1313 (earlier known as Ring), managed to get
1314 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">its latest version</a>
1315 into Debian Testing.  Several of its dependencies has caused build and
1316 propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now.</p>
1317
1318 <p>In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how
1319 bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not
1320 connected to external IDs like phone numbers.  This allow me to set up
1321 computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find
1322 get a phone number for each computer.  Automatic notification via Jami
1323 is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus
1324 service).  Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any
1325 system send a message to any Jami address.  It will create a new
1326 identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist
1327 already:</p>
1328
1329 <p><pre>
1330 #!/bin/sh
1331 #
1332 # Usage: $0 <jami-address> <message>
1333 #
1334 # Send <message> to <jami-address>, create local jami account if
1335 # missing.
1336 #
1337 # License: GPL v2 or later at your choice
1338 # Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
1339
1340
1341 if [ -z "$HOME" ] ; then
1342     echo "error: missing \$HOME, required for dbus to work"
1343     exit 1
1344 fi
1345
1346 # First, get dbus running if not already running
1347 DBUSLAUNCH=/usr/bin/dbus-launch
1348 PIDFILE=/run/asterisk/dbus-session.pid
1349 if [ -e $PIDFILE ] ; then
1350     . $PIDFILE
1351     if ! kill -0 $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID 2>/dev/null ; then
1352         unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
1353     fi
1354 fi
1355 if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] && [ -x "$DBUSLAUNCH" ]; then
1356     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=$HOME/.dbus"
1357     dbus-daemon --session --address="$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" --nofork --nopidfile --syslog-only < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 &
1358     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$!
1359     (
1360         echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
1361         echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\""$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"\"
1362         echo export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
1363     ) > $PIDFILE
1364     . $PIDFILE
1365 fi &
1366
1367 dringop() {
1368     part="$1"; shift
1369     op="$1"; shift
1370     dbus-send --session \
1371         --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
1372 }
1373
1374 dringopreply() {
1375     part="$1"; shift
1376     op="$1"; shift
1377     dbus-send --session --print-reply \
1378         --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
1379 }
1380
1381 firstaccount() {
1382     dringopreply ConfigurationManager getAccountList | \
1383       grep string | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | head -n 1
1384 }
1385
1386 account=$(firstaccount)
1387
1388 if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
1389     echo "Missing local account, trying to create it"
1390     dringop ConfigurationManager addAccount \
1391       dict:string:string:"Account.type","RING","Account.videoEnabled","false"
1392     account=$(firstaccount)
1393     if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
1394         echo "unable to create local account"
1395         exit 1
1396     fi
1397 fi
1398
1399 # Not using dringopreply to ensure $2 can contain spaces
1400 dbus-send --print-reply --session \
1401   --dest=cx.ring.Ring \
1402   /cx/ring/Ring/ConfigurationManager \
1403   cx.ring.Ring.ConfigurationManager.sendTextMessage \
1404   string:"$account" string:"$1" \
1405   dict:string:string:"text/plain","$2"
1406 </pre></p>
1407
1408 <p>If you want to check it out yourself, visit the
1409 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system project page</a> to learn
1410 more, and install the latest Jami client from Debian Unstable or
1411 Testing.</p>
1412
1413 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1414 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1415 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1416
1417       </div>
1418       <div class="tags">
1419
1420
1421         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1422
1423
1424       </div>
1425     </div>
1426     <div class="padding"></div>
1427
1428     <div class="entry">
1429       <div class="title">
1430         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Buster_based_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Buster based Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
1431       </div>
1432       <div class="date">
1433         20th October 2020
1434       </div>
1435       <div class="body">
1436         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
1437
1438 <p>I am happy to report that we finally made it!  Norwegian Bokmål
1439 became the first translation published on paper of the new Buster
1440 based edition of "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1441 Administrator's Handbook</a>".  The print proof reading copy arrived
1442 some days ago, and it looked good, so now the book is approved for
1443 general distribution.  This updated paperback edition <a
1444 href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available from
1445 lulu.com</a>.  The book is also available for download in electronic
1446 form as PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, and can also be
1447 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online</a>.</p>
1448
1449 <p>I am very happy to wrap up this Creative Common licensed project,
1450 which concludes several months of work by several volunteers. The
1451 number of Linux related books published in Norwegian are few, and I
1452 really hope this one will gain many readers, as it is packed with deep
1453 knowledge on Linux and the Debian ecosystem.  The book will be
1454 available for various Internet book stores like Amazon and Barnes &
1455 Noble soon, but I recommend buying
1456 "<a href="https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/roland-mas-and-rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-9j7qwq.html">Håndbok
1457 for Debian-administratoren</a>" directly from the source at Lulu.
1458
1459 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1460 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1461 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1462
1463       </div>
1464       <div class="tags">
1465
1466
1467         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1468
1469
1470       </div>
1471     </div>
1472     <div class="padding"></div>
1473
1474     <div class="entry">
1475       <div class="title">
1476         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Buster_update_of_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_almost_done.html">Buster update of Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook almost done</a>
1477       </div>
1478       <div class="date">
1479         11th September 2020
1480       </div>
1481       <div class="body">
1482         <p>Thanks to the good work of several volunteers, the updated edition
1483 of the Norwegian translation for
1484 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1485 Handbook</a>" is now almost completed.  After many months of proof
1486 reading, I consider the proof reading complete enough for us to move
1487 to the next step, and have asked for the print version to be prepared
1488 and sent of to the print on demand service lulu.com.  While it is
1489 still not to late if you find any incorrect translations on
1490 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/nb_NO/debian-handbook/">the
1491 hosted Weblate service</a>, but it will be soon. :) You can check out
1492 <a href=" https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">the Buster
1493 edition on the web</a> until the print edition is ready.</p>
1494
1495 <p>The book will be for sale on lulu.com and various web book stores,
1496 with links available from the web site for the book linked to above.
1497 I hope a lot of readers find it useful.</p>
1498
1499 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1500 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1501 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1502
1503       </div>
1504       <div class="tags">
1505
1506
1507         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1508
1509
1510       </div>
1511     </div>
1512     <div class="padding"></div>
1513
1514     <div class="entry">
1515       <div class="title">
1516         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Working_on_updated_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Working on updated Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
1517       </div>
1518       <div class="date">
1519          4th July 2020
1520       </div>
1521       <div class="body">
1522         <p>Three years ago, the first Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1523 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1524 Handbook</a>" was published.  This was based on Debian Jessie.  Now a
1525 new and updated version based on Buster is getting ready.  Work on the
1526 updated Norwegian Bokmål edition has been going on for a few months
1527 now, and yesterday, we reached the first mile stone, with 100% of the
1528 texts being translated.  A lot of proof reading remains, of course,
1529 but a major step towards a new edition has been taken.</p>
1530
1531 <p>The book is translated by volunteers, and we would love to get some
1532 help with the proof reading.  The translation uses
1533 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/nb_NO/debian-handbook/">the
1534 hosted Weblate service</a>, and we welcome everyone to have a look and
1535 submit improvements and suggestions.  There is also a proof readers
1536 PDF available on request, get in touch if you want to help out that
1537 way.</p>
1538
1539 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1540 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1541 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1542
1543       </div>
1544       <div class="tags">
1545
1546
1547         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1548
1549
1550       </div>
1551     </div>
1552     <div class="padding"></div>
1553
1554     <div class="entry">
1555       <div class="title">
1556         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Secure_Socket_API___a_simple_and_powerful_approach_for_TLS_support_in_software.html">Secure Socket API - a simple and powerful approach for TLS support in software</a>
1557       </div>
1558       <div class="date">
1559          6th June 2020
1560       </div>
1561       <div class="body">
1562         <p>As a member of the <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix
1563 User Group</a>, I have the pleasure of receiving the
1564 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a> magazine
1565 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/">;login:</a>
1566 several times a year.  I rarely have time to read all the articles,
1567 but try to at least skim through them all as there is a lot of nice
1568 knowledge passed on there.  I even carry the latest issue with me most
1569 of the time to try to get through all the articles when I have a few
1570 spare minutes.</p>
1571
1572 <p>The other day I came across a nice article titled
1573 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/winter2018/oneill">The
1574 Secure Socket API: TLS as an Operating System Service</a>" with a
1575 marvellous idea I hope can make it all the way into the POSIX standard.
1576 The idea is as simple as it is powerful.  By introducing a new
1577 socket() option IPPROTO_TLS to use TLS, and a system wide service to
1578 handle setting up TLS connections, one both make it trivial to add TLS
1579 support to any program currently using the POSIX socket API, and gain
1580 system wide control over certificates, TLS versions and encryption
1581 systems used.  Instead of doing this:</p>
1582
1583 <p><blockquote><pre>
1584 int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);
1585 </pre></blockquote></p>
1586
1587 <p>the program code would be doing this:<p>
1588
1589 <p><blockquote><pre>
1590 int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TLS);
1591 </pre></blockquote></p>
1592
1593 <p>According to the ;login: article, converting a C program to use TLS
1594 would normally modify only 5-10 lines in the code, which is amazing
1595 when compared to using for example the OpenSSL API.</p>
1596
1597 <p>The project has set up the
1598 <a href="https://securesocketapi.org/">https://securesocketapi.org/</a>
1599 web site to spread the idea, and the code for a kernel module and the
1600 associated system daemon is available from two github repositories:
1601 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa">ssa</a> and
1602 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa-daemon">ssa-daemon</a>.
1603 Unfortunately there is no explicit license information with the code,
1604 so its copyright status is unclear.  A
1605 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa/issues/2">request to solve
1606 this</a> about it has been unsolved since 2018-08-17.</p>
1607
1608 <p>I love the idea of extending socket() to gain TLS support, and
1609 understand why it is an advantage to implement this as a kernel module
1610 and system wide service daemon, but can not help to think that it
1611 would be a lot easier to get projects to move to this way of setting
1612 up TLS if it was done with a user space approach where programs
1613 wanting to use this API approach could just link with a wrapper
1614 library.</p>
1615
1616 <p>I recommend you check out this simple and powerful approach to more
1617 secure network connections. :)</p>
1618
1619 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1620 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1621 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1622
1623       </div>
1624       <div class="tags">
1625
1626
1627         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1628
1629
1630       </div>
1631     </div>
1632     <div class="padding"></div>
1633
1634     <div class="entry">
1635       <div class="title">
1636         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_as_a_Zoom_client__a_trick_for_password_protected_rooms___.html">Jami as a Zoom client, a trick for password protected rooms...</a>
1637       </div>
1638       <div class="date">
1639          8th May 2020
1640       </div>
1641       <div class="body">
1642         <p>Half a year ago,
1643 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">I
1644 wrote</a> about <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami communication
1645 client</a>, capable of peer-to-peer encrypted communication.  It
1646 handle both messages, audio and video.  It uses distributed hash
1647 tables instead of central infrastructure to connect its users to each
1648 other, which in my book is a plus.  I mentioned briefly that it could
1649 also work as a SIP client, which came in handy when the higher
1650 educational sector in Norway started to promote Zoom as its video
1651 conferencing solution.  I am reluctant to use the official Zoom client
1652 software, due to their <a href="https://zoom.us/terms">copyright
1653 license clauses</a> prohibiting users to reverse engineer (for example
1654 to check the security) and benchmark it, and thus prefer to connect to
1655 Zoom meetings with free software clients.</p>
1656
1657 <p>Jami worked OK as a SIP client to Zoom as long as there was no
1658 password set on the room.  The Jami daemon leak memory like crazy
1659 (approximately 1 GiB a minute) when I am connected to the video
1660 conference, so I had to restart the client every 7-10 minutes, which
1661 is not great.  I tried to get other SIP Linux clients to work
1662 without success, so I decided I would have to live with this wart
1663 until someone managed to fix the leak in the dring code base.  But
1664 another problem showed up once the rooms were password protected.  I
1665 could not get my dial tone signaling through from Jami to Zoom, and
1666 dial tone signaling is used to enter the password when connecting to
1667 Zoom.  I tried a lot of different permutations with my Jami and
1668 Asterisk setup to try to figure out why the signaling did not get
1669 through, only to finally discover that the fundamental problem seem to
1670 be that Zoom is simply not able to receive dial tone signaling when
1671 connecting via SIP.  There seem to be nothing wrong with the Jami and
1672 Asterisk end, it is simply broken in the Zoom end.  I got help from a
1673 very skilled VoIP engineer figuring out this last part.  And being a
1674 very skilled engineer, he was also able to locate a solution for me.
1675 Or to be exact, a workaround that solve my initial problem of
1676 connecting to password protected Zoom rooms using Jami.</p>
1677
1678 <p>So, how do you do this, I am sure you are wondering by now.  The
1679 trick is already
1680 <a href="https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/202405539-H-323-SIP-Room-Connector-Dial-Strings#sip">documented
1681 from Zoom</a>, and it is to modify the SIP address to include the room
1682 password.  What is most surprising about this is that the
1683 automatically generated email from Zoom with instructions on how to
1684 connect via SIP do not mention this.  The SIP address to use normally
1685 consist of the room ID (a number), an @ character and the IP address
1686 of the Zoom SIP gateway.  But Zoom understand a lot more than just the
1687 room ID in front of the at sign.  The format is "<tt>[Meeting
1688 ID].[Password].[Layout].[Host Key]</tt>", and you can here see how you
1689 can both enter password, control the layout (full screen, active
1690 presence and gallery) and specify the host key to start the meeting.
1691 The full SIP address entered into Jami to provide the password will
1692 then look like this (all using made up numbers):</p>
1693
1694 <p><blockquote>
1695 <tt>sip:657837644.522827@192.168.169.170</tt>
1696 </blockquote></p>
1697
1698 <p>Now if only jami would reduce its memory usage, I could even
1699 recommend this setup to others. :)</p>
1700
1701 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1702 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1703 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1704
1705       </div>
1706       <div class="tags">
1707
1708
1709         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1710
1711
1712       </div>
1713     </div>
1714     <div class="padding"></div>
1715
1716     <div class="entry">
1717       <div class="title">
1718         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/GnuCOBOL__a_free_platform_to_learn_and_use_COBOL___nice_free_software.html">GnuCOBOL, a free platform to learn and use COBOL - nice free software</a>
1719       </div>
1720       <div class="date">
1721         29th April 2020
1722       </div>
1723       <div class="body">
1724         <p>The curiosity got the better of me when
1725 <a href="https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/04/06/1424246/new-jersey-desperately-needs-cobol-programmers">Slashdot
1726 reported</a> that New Jersey was desperately looking for
1727 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL">COBOL</a> programmers,
1728 and a few days later it was reported that
1729 <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/ibm-rallies-cobol-engineers-to-save-overloaded-unemployment-systems-eeadf13eddce">IBM
1730 tried to locate COBOL programmers</a>.</p>
1731
1732 <p>I thus decided to have a look at free software alternatives to
1733 learn COBOL, and had the pleasure to find
1734 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/">GnuCOBOL</a> was
1735 already <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnucobol">in
1736 Debian</a>.  It used to be called Open Cobol, and is a "compiler"
1737 transforming COBOL code to C or C++ before giving it to GCC or Visual
1738 Studio to build binaries.</p>
1739
1740 <p>I managed to get in touch with upstream, and was impressed with the
1741 quick response, and also was happy to see a new Debian maintainer
1742 taking over when the original one recently asked to be replaced.  A
1743 new Debian upload was done as recently as yesterday.</p>
1744
1745 <p>Using the Debian package, I was able to follow a simple COBOL
1746 introduction and make and run simple COBOL programs.  It was fun to
1747 learn a new programming language.  If you want to test for yourself,
1748 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL">the GnuCOBOL Wikipedia
1749 page</a> have a few simple examples to get you startet.</p>
1750
1751 <p>As I do not have much experience with COBOL, I do not know how
1752 standard compliant it is, but it claim to pass most tests from COBOL
1753 test suite, which sound good to me.  It is nice to know it is possible
1754 to learn COBOL using software without any usage restrictions, and I am
1755 very happy such nice free software project as this is available.  If
1756 you as me is curious about COBOL, check it out.</p>
1757
1758 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1759 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1760 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1761
1762       </div>
1763       <div class="tags">
1764
1765
1766         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1767
1768
1769       </div>
1770     </div>
1771     <div class="padding"></div>
1772
1773     <div class="entry">
1774       <div class="title">
1775         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">Jami/Ring, finally functioning peer to peer communication client</a>
1776       </div>
1777       <div class="date">
1778         19th June 2019
1779       </div>
1780       <div class="body">
1781         <p>Some years ago, in 2016, I
1782 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">wrote
1783 for the first time about</a> the Ring peer to peer messaging system.
1784 It would provide messaging without any central server coordinating the
1785 system and without requiring all users to register a phone number or
1786 own a mobile phone.  Back then, I could not get it to work, and put it
1787 aside until it had seen more development.  A few days ago I decided to
1788 give it another try, and am happy to report that this time I am able
1789 to not only send and receive messages, but also place audio and video
1790 calls.  But only if UDP is not blocked into your network.</p>
1791
1792 <p>The Ring system changed name earlier this year to
1793 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>.  I
1794 tried doing web search for 'ring' when I discovered it for the first
1795 time, and can only applaud this change as it is impossible to find
1796 something called Ring among the noise of other uses of that word.  Now
1797 you can search for 'jami' and this client and
1798 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system</a> is the first hit at
1799 least on duckduckgo.</p>
1800
1801 <p>Jami will by default encrypt messages as well as audio and video
1802 calls, and try to send them directly between the communicating parties
1803 if possible.  If this proves impossible (for example if both ends are
1804 behind NAT), it will use a central SIP TURN server maintained by the
1805 Jami project.  Jami can also be a normal SIP client.  If the SIP
1806 server is unencrypted, the audio and video calls will also be
1807 unencrypted.  This is as far as I know the only case where Jami will
1808 do anything without encryption.</p>
1809
1810 <p>Jami is available for several platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOSX,
1811 Android, iOS, and Android TV.  It is included in Debian already.  Jami
1812 also work for those using F-Droid without any Google connections,
1813 while Signal do not.
1814 <a href="https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/technical/Protocol">The
1815 protocol</a> is described in the Ring project wiki.  The system uses a
1816 distributed hash table (DHT) system (similar to BitTorrent) running
1817 over UDP.  On one of the networks I use, I discovered Jami failed to
1818 work.  I tracked this down to the fact that incoming UDP packages
1819 going to ports 1-49999 were blocked, and the DHT would pick a random
1820 port and end up in the low range most of the time.  After talking to
1821 the developers, I solved this by enabling the dhtproxy in the
1822 settings, thus using TCP to talk to a central DHT proxy instead of
1823
1824 peering directly with others.  I've been told the developers are
1825 working on allowing DHT to use TCP to avoid this problem.  I also ran
1826 into a problem when trying to talk to the version of Ring included in
1827 Debian Stable (Stretch).  Apparently the protocol changed between
1828 beta2 and the current version, making these clients incompatible.
1829 Hopefully the protocol will not be made incompatible in the
1830 future.</p>
1831
1832 <p>It is worth noting that while looking at Jami and its features, I
1833 came across another communication platform I have not tested yet.  The
1834 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)">Tox protocol</a>
1835 and <a href="https://tox.chat/">family of Tox clients</a>.  It might
1836 become the topic of a future blog post.</p>
1837
1838 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1839 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1840 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1841
1842       </div>
1843       <div class="tags">
1844
1845
1846         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1847
1848
1849       </div>
1850     </div>
1851     <div class="padding"></div>
1852
1853     <div class="entry">
1854       <div class="title">
1855         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Strategispillet_Unknown_Horizons_n__tilgjengelig_p__bokm_l.html">Strategispillet Unknown Horizons nå tilgjengelig på bokmål</a>
1856       </div>
1857       <div class="date">
1858         23rd January 2019
1859       </div>
1860       <div class="body">
1861         <p>I høst ble jeg inspirert til å bidra til oversettelsen av
1862 <a href="http://unknown-horizons.org/">strategispillet Unknown
1863 Horizons</a>, og oversatte de nesten 200 strengene i prosjektet til
1864 bokmål.  Deretter har jeg gått å ventet på at det kom en ny utgave som
1865 inneholdt disse oversettelsene.  Nå er endelig ventetiden over.  Den
1866 nye versjonen kom på nyåret, og ble
1867 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/unknown-horizons">lastet opp i
1868 Debian</a> for noen få dager siden.  I går kveld fikk jeg testet det ut, og
1869 må innrømme at oversettelsene fungerer fint.  Fant noen få tekster som
1870 måtte justeres, men ikke noe alvorlig.  Har oppdatert
1871 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/">oversettelsen på
1872 Weblate</a>, slik at neste utgave vil være enda bedre. :)</p>
1873
1874 <p>Spillet er et ressursstyringsspill ala Civilization, og er morsomt
1875 å spille for oss som liker slikt. :)</p>
1876
1877 <p>Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
1878 det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
1879 til min adresse
1880 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.
1881 Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)</p>
1882
1883       </div>
1884       <div class="tags">
1885
1886
1887         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
1888
1889
1890       </div>
1891     </div>
1892     <div class="padding"></div>
1893
1894     <div class="entry">
1895       <div class="title">
1896         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html">Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit</a>
1897       </div>
1898       <div class="date">
1899         22nd January 2019
1900       </div>
1901       <div class="body">
1902         <p>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
1903 everything you need to program the <a href="https://microbit.org/">BBC
1904 micro:bit</a> is available from the Debian archive.  All this is
1905 thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
1906 packaging team.  The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
1907 program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
1908 machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
1909 into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.</p>
1910
1911 <p>There are three main pieces involved.  The first to enter Debian
1912 was
1913 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash">python-uflash</a>,
1914 which was accepted into the archive 2019-01-12.  The next one was
1915 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor">mu-editor</a>, which
1916 showed up 2019-01-13.  The final and hardest part to to into the
1917 archive was
1918 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython">firmware-microbit-micropython</a>,
1919 which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
1920 before it was accepted 2019-01-20.  The last one is already in Debian
1921 Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days.  This
1922 all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
1923 'apt install mu-editor' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
1924 Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
1925 catered for.</p>
1926
1927 <p>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
1928 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the isenkram
1929 package</a> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
1930 package.  This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
1931 get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
1932 the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.</p>
1933
1934 <p>This should make it easier to have fun.</p>
1935
1936 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1937 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1938 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1939
1940       </div>
1941       <div class="tags">
1942
1943
1944         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1945
1946
1947       </div>
1948     </div>
1949     <div class="padding"></div>
1950
1951     <div class="entry">
1952       <div class="title">
1953         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html">Learn to program with Minetest on Debian</a>
1954       </div>
1955       <div class="date">
1956         15th December 2018
1957       </div>
1958       <div class="body">
1959         <p>A fun way to learn how to program
1960 <a href="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is to follow the
1961 instructions in the book
1962 "<a href="https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft">Learn to program
1963 with Minecraft</a>", which introduces programming in Python to people
1964 who like to play with Minecraft.  The book uses a Python library to
1965 talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
1966 providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
1967 The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
1968 Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
1969 Minecraft.  The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
1970 and Raspian.  But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
1971 recipes using the free software construction game
1972 <a href="https://minetest.net/">Minetest</a>.</p>
1973
1974 <p>There is <a href="https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod">a
1975 Minetest module implementing the same API</a>, making it possible to
1976 use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
1977 I
1978 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%2Bdfsg-1.html">uploaded
1979 this module</a> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
1980 FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
1981 Debian will be a simple 'apt install' away.  The Debian package is
1982 maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
1983 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft">the
1984 packaging rules</a> are currently located under 'unfinished' on
1985 Salsa.</p>
1986
1987 <p>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
1988 modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
1989 well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
1990 provided via modules in Minetest.  Without the required blocks, a
1991 simple stone block is used instead.  My initial testing with a analog
1992 clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
1993 instead used stone arms.</p>
1994
1995 <p>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
1996 Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes.  The
1997 <a href="https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/">recipes</a>
1998 I <a href="https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi">found</a> are only
1999 working with a standalone Minecraft server setup.  Are there any
2000 options to use with the normal desktop version?</p>
2001
2002 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2003 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2004 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2005
2006       </div>
2007       <div class="tags">
2008
2009
2010         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2011
2012
2013       </div>
2014     </div>
2015     <div class="padding"></div>
2016
2017     <div class="entry">
2018       <div class="title">
2019         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html">Time for an official MIME type for patches?</a>
2020       </div>
2021       <div class="date">
2022          1st November 2018
2023       </div>
2024       <div class="body">
2025         <p>As part of my involvement in
2026 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
2027 archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
2028 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
2029 go.  I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
2030 notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
2031 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
2032 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
2033 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
2034 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
2035 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
2036 official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF.  The output from
2037 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
2038 included in these emails.  At the moment people seem to use either
2039 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered.  It
2040 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
2041 everywhere.</p>
2042
2043 <p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
2044 up the topic on
2045 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
2046 media-types mailing list</a>.  If you are interested in discussion
2047 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
2048 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
2049 to join the discussion?</p>
2050
2051 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2052 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2053 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2054
2055       </div>
2056       <div class="tags">
2057
2058
2059         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
2060
2061
2062       </div>
2063     </div>
2064     <div class="padding"></div>
2065
2066     <div class="entry">
2067       <div class="title">
2068         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html">Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian</a>
2069       </div>
2070       <div class="date">
2071          4th October 2018
2072       </div>
2073       <div class="body">
2074         <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian.  To try to
2075 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
2076 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
2077 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
2078 <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
2079 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
2080 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
2081 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
2082
2083 <p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
2084 ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user.  Next, I
2085 created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
2086 to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
2087
2088 <p><blockquote><pre>
2089 [Desktop Entry]
2090 Name=Google drive autosync
2091 Type=Application
2092 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
2093 </pre></blockquote></p>
2094
2095 <p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
2096 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
2097
2098 <p><blockquote><pre>
2099 #!/bin/sh
2100 set -e
2101 cd ~/
2102 cleanup() {
2103     if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
2104         kill $syncpid
2105     fi
2106 }
2107 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
2108 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
2109 syncpdi=$!
2110 while true; do
2111     if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
2112         echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
2113         exit 1
2114     fi
2115     if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
2116         /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
2117     fi
2118     sleep 300
2119 done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
2120 </pre></blockquote></p>
2121
2122 <p>Feel free to use the setup if you want.  It can be assumed to be
2123 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
2124 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
2125
2126 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2127 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2128 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2129
2130       </div>
2131       <div class="tags">
2132
2133
2134         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2135
2136
2137       </div>
2138     </div>
2139     <div class="padding"></div>
2140
2141     <div class="entry">
2142       <div class="title">
2143         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
2144       </div>
2145       <div class="date">
2146          2nd September 2018
2147       </div>
2148       <div class="body">
2149         <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
2150 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
2151 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard.  After searching the
2152 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
2153 to find a recipe that worked.  If you got a kodi instance with its API
2154 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
2155 have check out a nice cover band.</p>
2156
2157 <p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
2158   --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
2159   "params": {"item": { "file":
2160   "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
2161   http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
2162
2163 <p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
2164 first argument.  It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
2165 and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi.  It is almost like a
2166 Chromecast. :)</p>
2167
2168 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2169 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2170 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2171
2172       </div>
2173       <div class="tags">
2174
2175
2176         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2177
2178
2179       </div>
2180     </div>
2181     <div class="padding"></div>
2182
2183     <div class="entry">
2184       <div class="title">
2185         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
2186       </div>
2187       <div class="date">
2188         31st July 2018
2189       </div>
2190       <div class="body">
2191         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
2192 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
2193 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
2194 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
2195 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
2196 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
2197 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
2198 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
2199 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
2200 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
2201 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
2202 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
2203 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
2204
2205 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
2206 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
2207 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
2208 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
2209 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
2210 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
2211 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
2212 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
2213 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
2214 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
2215 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
2216 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
2217 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
2218
2219 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
2220 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
2221 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
2222 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
2223 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
2224 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
2225 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
2226 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
2227 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
2228 seem to have the support I need.</p>
2229
2230 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
2231 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
2232 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
2233 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
2234
2235 <blockquote><pre>
2236 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
2237   -description='The RSS image description.' \
2238   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
2239 </pre></blockquote>
2240
2241 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
2242 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
2243 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
2244 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
2245 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
2246
2247 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
2248 suggestions.</p>
2249
2250 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2251 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2252 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2253
2254       </div>
2255       <div class="tags">
2256
2257
2258         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2259
2260
2261       </div>
2262     </div>
2263     <div class="padding"></div>
2264
2265     <div class="entry">
2266       <div class="title">
2267         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
2268       </div>
2269       <div class="date">
2270         12th July 2018
2271       </div>
2272       <div class="body">
2273         <p>Last night, I wrote
2274 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
2275 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
2276 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
2277 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
2278 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
2279 care of it all.</p>
2280
2281 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
2282 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
2283 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
2284 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
2285 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
2286 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
2287 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
2288 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
2289 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
2290 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
2291 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
2292 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
2293 I only care about the picture part.</p>
2294
2295 <blockquote><pre>
2296 #!/bin/sh
2297 #
2298 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
2299 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
2300 # for backgorund information.
2301
2302 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
2303 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
2304 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
2305 kodicmd() {
2306     host="$1"
2307     cmd="$2"
2308     params="$3"
2309     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
2310          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
2311          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
2312 }
2313 cleanup() {
2314     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
2315         # Stop the playing when we end
2316         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
2317                             jq .result[].playerid)
2318         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
2319     fi
2320     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
2321         kill "$gstpid"
2322     fi
2323 }
2324 trap cleanup EXIT INT
2325
2326 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
2327     kodihost=$1
2328     shift
2329 else
2330     kodihost=kodi.local
2331 fi
2332
2333 mcast=239.255.0.1
2334 mcastport=1234
2335 mcastttl=1
2336
2337 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
2338   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
2339 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
2340   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2341   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
2342   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2343   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
2344   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
2345   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
2346   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
2347 gstpid=$!
2348
2349 # Give stream a second to get going
2350 sleep 1
2351
2352 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
2353 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
2354         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
2355
2356 # wait for gst to end
2357 wait "$gstpid"
2358 </pre></blockquote>
2359
2360 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
2361
2362 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2363 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2364 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2365
2366       </div>
2367       <div class="tags">
2368
2369
2370         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2371
2372
2373       </div>
2374     </div>
2375     <div class="padding"></div>
2376
2377     <div class="entry">
2378       <div class="title">
2379         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
2380       </div>
2381       <div class="date">
2382         12th July 2018
2383       </div>
2384       <div class="body">
2385         <p>PS: See
2386 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
2387 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
2388
2389 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
2390 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
2391 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
2392 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
2393 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
2394 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
2395
2396 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
2397 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
2398 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
2399 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
2400 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
2401 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
2402
2403 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
2404 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
2405 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
2406 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
2407 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
2408 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
2409
2410 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
2411 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
2412 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
2413 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
2414 the programs I work on.</p>
2415
2416 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
2417 rtp and rtsp recipes from
2418 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
2419 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
2420 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
2421
2422 <blockquote><pre>
2423 vlc screen:// --sout \
2424   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
2425 </pre></blockquote>
2426
2427 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
2428 same IP address:</p>
2429
2430 <blockquote><pre>
2431 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
2432   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2433 </pre></blockquote>
2434
2435 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
2436 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
2437 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
2438 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
2439 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
2440 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
2441 big screen. :)</p>
2442
2443 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
2444 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
2445 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
2446 enough to tell.</p>
2447
2448 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
2449 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
2450 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
2451 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
2452 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
2453 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
2454 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
2455 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
2456 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
2457 the source end
2458
2459 <blockquote><pre>
2460 cvlc screen:// --sout \
2461   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
2462 </pre></blockquote>
2463
2464 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
2465
2466 <blockquote><pre>
2467 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
2468   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2469 </pre></blockquote>
2470
2471 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
2472 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
2473 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
2474 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
2475 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
2476 difference.</p>
2477
2478 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
2479 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
2480 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
2481 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
2482 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
2483 multicast address on port 1234:
2484
2485 <blockquote><pre>
2486 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
2487   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2488   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
2489   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2490   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
2491   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
2492   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
2493     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
2494   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
2495 </pre></blockquote>
2496
2497 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
2498
2499 <blockquote><pre>
2500 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
2501   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2502 </pre></blockquote>
2503
2504 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
2505 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
2506 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
2507 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
2508 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
2509 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
2510 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
2511
2512 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
2513 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
2514 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
2515 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
2516
2517 <blockquote><pre>
2518 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
2519 </pre></blockquote>
2520
2521 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2522 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2523 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2524
2525       </div>
2526       <div class="tags">
2527
2528
2529         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2530
2531
2532       </div>
2533     </div>
2534     <div class="padding"></div>
2535
2536     <div class="entry">
2537       <div class="title">
2538         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
2539       </div>
2540       <div class="date">
2541          9th July 2018
2542       </div>
2543       <div class="body">
2544         <p>Five years ago,
2545 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
2546 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
2547 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
2548 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
2549 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
2550 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
2551 unstable only this time:
2552
2553 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
2554
2555 <pre>
2556   count MIME type
2557   ----- -----------------------
2558      56 image/jpeg
2559      55 image/png
2560      49 image/tiff
2561      48 image/gif
2562      39 image/bmp
2563      38 text/plain
2564      37 audio/mpeg
2565      34 application/ogg
2566      33 audio/x-flac
2567      32 audio/x-mp3
2568      30 audio/x-wav
2569      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
2570      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
2571      27 inode/directory
2572      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
2573      27 audio/x-mpeg
2574      26 application/x-ogg
2575      25 audio/x-mpegurl
2576      25 audio/ogg
2577      24 text/html
2578 </pre>
2579
2580 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
2581 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
2582 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
2583
2584 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
2585 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
2586 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
2587 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
2588 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
2589 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
2590 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
2591 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
2592 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
2593 list like this:</p>
2594
2595 <p><blockquote><pre>
2596 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
2597 Package: anjuta
2598 Package: audacious
2599 Package: baobab
2600 Package: cervisia
2601 Package: chirp
2602 Package: dolphin
2603 Package: doublecmd-common
2604 Package: easytag
2605 Package: enlightenment
2606 Package: ephoto
2607 Package: filelight
2608 Package: gwenview
2609 Package: k4dirstat
2610 Package: kaffeine
2611 Package: kdesvn
2612 Package: kid3
2613 Package: kid3-qt
2614 Package: nautilus
2615 Package: nemo
2616 Package: pcmanfm
2617 Package: pcmanfm-qt
2618 Package: qweborf
2619 Package: ranger
2620 Package: sirikali
2621 Package: spacefm
2622 Package: spacefm
2623 Package: vifm
2624 %
2625 </pre></blockquote></p>
2626
2627 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
2628 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
2629
2630 <p><blockquote><pre>
2631 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
2632 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
2633 %
2634 </pre></blockquote></p>
2635
2636 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
2637 format:</p>
2638
2639 <p><blockquote><pre>
2640 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
2641 Package: cura
2642 Package: meshlab
2643 Package: printrun
2644 %
2645 </pre></blockquote></p>
2646
2647 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
2648
2649 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2650 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2651 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2652
2653       </div>
2654       <div class="tags">
2655
2656
2657         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2658
2659
2660       </div>
2661     </div>
2662     <div class="padding"></div>
2663
2664     <div class="entry">
2665       <div class="title">
2666         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
2667       </div>
2668       <div class="date">
2669          8th July 2018
2670       </div>
2671       <div class="body">
2672         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
2673 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
2674 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
2675 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
2676 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
2677 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
2678 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
2679 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
2680 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
2681 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
2682 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
2683
2684 <p><blockquote><pre>
2685 #!/bin/sh
2686 #
2687 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
2688 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
2689 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
2690 # flag for manual/automatic.
2691
2692 set -e
2693
2694 ignore() {
2695     if [ "$1" ]; then
2696         grep -v "$1"
2697     else
2698         cat
2699     fi
2700 }
2701
2702 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
2703     echo "Upgrading $p"
2704     apt clean
2705     apt install --download-only -y $p
2706     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
2707         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
2708             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
2709             break
2710         fi
2711     done
2712 done
2713 </pre></blockquote></p>
2714
2715 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
2716 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
2717 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
2718 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
2719 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
2720 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
2721 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
2722 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
2723 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
2724
2725 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
2726 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
2727 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
2728 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
2729 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
2730
2731 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
2732 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
2733 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
2734 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
2735 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
2736 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
2737 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
2738
2739 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2740 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2741 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2742
2743       </div>
2744       <div class="tags">
2745
2746
2747         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2748
2749
2750       </div>
2751     </div>
2752     <div class="padding"></div>
2753
2754     <div class="entry">
2755       <div class="title">
2756         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
2757       </div>
2758       <div class="date">
2759         13th February 2018
2760       </div>
2761       <div class="body">
2762         <p>A new version of the
2763 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
2764 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
2765 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
2766 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
2767 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
2768 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
2769 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
2770 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
2771 well.</p>
2772
2773 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
2774 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
2775 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
2776 in Debian.</p>
2777
2778 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2779 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2780 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2781
2782       </div>
2783       <div class="tags">
2784
2785
2786         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2787
2788
2789       </div>
2790     </div>
2791     <div class="padding"></div>
2792
2793     <div class="entry">
2794       <div class="title">
2795         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
2796       </div>
2797       <div class="date">
2798         17th December 2017
2799       </div>
2800       <div class="body">
2801         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
2802 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
2803 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
2804 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
2805 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
2806 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
2807 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
2808 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
2809 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
2810 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
2811 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
2812 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
2813 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
2814
2815 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
2816 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
2817 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
2818 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
2819 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
2820
2821 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
2822 team, flocking together on the
2823 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
2824 mailing list and the
2825 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
2826 IRC channel.</p>
2827
2828 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
2829 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
2830 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
2831
2832       </div>
2833       <div class="tags">
2834
2835
2836         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2837
2838
2839       </div>
2840     </div>
2841     <div class="padding"></div>
2842
2843     <div class="entry">
2844       <div class="title">
2845         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
2846       </div>
2847       <div class="date">
2848          9th October 2017
2849       </div>
2850       <div class="body">
2851         <p>At my nearby maker space,
2852 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
2853 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
2854 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
2855 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
2856 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
2857 as the software involved,
2858 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
2859 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
2860 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
2861 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
2862 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
2863 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
2864 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
2865
2866 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
2867 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
2868 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
2869 on
2870 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2871 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
2872
2873 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
2874 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
2875 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
2876 upstream version.</p>
2877
2878 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
2879 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
2880 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
2881 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
2882 Debian, check out
2883 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
2884 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
2885 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
2886
2887 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2888 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2889 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2890
2891       </div>
2892       <div class="tags">
2893
2894
2895         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2896
2897
2898       </div>
2899     </div>
2900     <div class="padding"></div>
2901
2902     <div class="entry">
2903       <div class="title">
2904         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
2905       </div>
2906       <div class="date">
2907         29th September 2017
2908       </div>
2909       <div class="body">
2910         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
2911 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
2912 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
2913 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
2914 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
2915 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
2916 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
2917 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
2918 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
2919 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
2920 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
2921 listen.</p>
2922
2923 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
2924 visualizing this information up and running for
2925 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
2926 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
2927 library.  The solution is based on the
2928 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
2929 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
2930 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
2931 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
2932 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
2933 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
2934 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
2935 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
2936
2937 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
2938 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
2939 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
2940 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
2941 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
2942 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
2943 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
2944 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
2945
2946 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
2947 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
2948 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
2949 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
2950 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
2951 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
2952 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
2953 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
2954 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
2955 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
2956 mentioned in
2957 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
2958 issue for the topic</a>.
2959
2960 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
2961
2962       </div>
2963       <div class="tags">
2964
2965
2966         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2967
2968
2969       </div>
2970     </div>
2971     <div class="padding"></div>
2972
2973     <div class="entry">
2974       <div class="title">
2975         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
2976       </div>
2977       <div class="date">
2978         24th September 2017
2979       </div>
2980       <div class="body">
2981         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
2982 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
2983 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
2984 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
2985 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
2986 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
2987 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
2988 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
2989 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
2990
2991 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
2992 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
2993 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
2994 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
2995
2996 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
2997 clone of two python scripts:</p>
2998
2999 <ol>
3000
3001 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
3002   testing).</li>
3003
3004 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
3005   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
3006
3007 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
3008   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
3009
3010 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
3011
3012 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
3013   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
3014   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
3015
3016 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
3017   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
3018
3019 </ol>
3020
3021 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
3022 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
3023 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
3024 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
3025 very cheaply
3026 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
3027 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
3028 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
3029
3030 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
3031 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
3032 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
3033 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
3034 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
3035 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
3036 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
3037 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
3038
3039 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
3040 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
3041 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
3042 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
3043 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
3044 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
3045 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
3046 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
3047 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
3048 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
3049 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
3050 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
3051
3052       </div>
3053       <div class="tags">
3054
3055
3056         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3057
3058
3059       </div>
3060     </div>
3061     <div class="padding"></div>
3062
3063     <div class="entry">
3064       <div class="title">
3065         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
3066       </div>
3067       <div class="date">
3068          9th August 2017
3069       </div>
3070       <div class="body">
3071         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
3072 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
3073 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
3074 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
3075 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
3076 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
3077 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
3078
3079 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
3080 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
3081 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
3082 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
3083 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
3084 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
3085 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
3086 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
3087 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
3088 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
3089 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
3090 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
3091 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
3092
3093 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
3094 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
3095 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
3096 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
3097 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
3098 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
3099 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
3100 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
3101 collector for a few days now.</p>
3102
3103 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
3104
3105 <ol>
3106
3107 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
3108
3109 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
3110 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
3111
3112 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
3113
3114 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
3115 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
3116 found a GSM station).</li>
3117
3118 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
3119
3120 </ol>
3121
3122 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
3123 running, I decided to package
3124 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
3125 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
3126 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
3127 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
3128 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
3129
3130 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
3131 commercial tools like
3132 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
3133 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
3134 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
3135 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
3136 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
3137 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
3138 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
3139 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
3140 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
3141 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
3142 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
3143 of government officials...</p>
3144
3145 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
3146 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
3147 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
3148 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
3149 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
3150 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
3151 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
3152 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
3153 one frequency?</p>
3154
3155       </div>
3156       <div class="tags">
3157
3158
3159         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3160
3161
3162       </div>
3163     </div>
3164     <div class="padding"></div>
3165
3166     <div class="entry">
3167       <div class="title">
3168         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
3169       </div>
3170       <div class="date">
3171         25th July 2017
3172       </div>
3173       <div class="body">
3174         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
3175
3176 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
3177 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
3178 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
3179 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
3180 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
3181 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
3182 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
3183 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
3184 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
3185 as a web page</a>.</p>
3186
3187 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
3188 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
3189 in
3190 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
3191 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
3192 and
3193 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
3194 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
3195 project.  I hope
3196 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
3197 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
3198
3199       </div>
3200       <div class="tags">
3201
3202
3203         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3204
3205
3206       </div>
3207     </div>
3208     <div class="padding"></div>
3209
3210     <div class="entry">
3211       <div class="title">
3212         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
3213       </div>
3214       <div class="date">
3215          3rd June 2017
3216       </div>
3217       <div class="body">
3218         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
3219 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
3220 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
3221 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
3222 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
3223 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
3224 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
3225
3226 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
3227
3228 <blockquote>
3229 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
3230 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
3231 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
3232
3233 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
3234 på temaet:</p>
3235 <ol>
3236 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
3237 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
3238 </ol>
3239
3240 </blockquote>
3241
3242 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
3243
3244 <blockquote>
3245 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
3246 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
3247 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
3248
3249 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
3250 temaet:</p>
3251
3252 <ol>
3253 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
3254 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
3255 </ol>
3256
3257 </blockquote>
3258
3259 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
3260 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
3261 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
3262 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
3263 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
3264 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
3265 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
3266
3267       </div>
3268       <div class="tags">
3269
3270
3271         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
3272
3273
3274       </div>
3275     </div>
3276     <div class="padding"></div>
3277
3278     <div class="entry">
3279       <div class="title">
3280         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
3281       </div>
3282       <div class="date">
3283          9th March 2017
3284       </div>
3285       <div class="body">
3286         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
3287 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
3288 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
3289 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
3290 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
3291 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
3292 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
3293 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
3294
3295 <p><blockquote>
3296 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
3297 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
3298 </blockquote></p>
3299
3300 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
3301 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
3302 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
3303 are noticed.</p>
3304
3305 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
3306 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
3307 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
3308 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
3309 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
3310 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
3311
3312 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
3313 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
3314 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
3315 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
3316 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
3317 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
3318
3319 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
3320
3321 <p><blockquote><pre>
3322 [...]
3323 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
3324 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
3325         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
3326         age:    7863311
3327         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
3328         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
3329         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
3330         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
3331         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
3332         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
3333         per-op statistics
3334                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3335              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
3336              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
3337               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
3338               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
3339             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
3340                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
3341                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
3342               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
3343                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
3344              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
3345                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
3346               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
3347                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
3348               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
3349                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
3350              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
3351          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
3352               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
3353               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
3354             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
3355               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3356
3357 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
3358 [...]
3359 </pre></blockquote></p>
3360
3361 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
3362 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
3363 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
3364 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
3365 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
3366 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
3367 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
3368 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
3369 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
3370 mount options.</p>
3371
3372 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
3373 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
3374 But according to
3375 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
3376 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
3377 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
3378 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
3379 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
3380 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
3381
3382 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
3383 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
3384 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
3385 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
3386 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
3387
3388       </div>
3389       <div class="tags">
3390
3391
3392         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
3393
3394
3395       </div>
3396     </div>
3397     <div class="padding"></div>
3398
3399     <div class="entry">
3400       <div class="title">
3401         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
3402       </div>
3403       <div class="date">
3404          3rd March 2017
3405       </div>
3406       <div class="body">
3407         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
3408 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
3409 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
3410 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
3411 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
3412 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
3413 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
3414 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
3415 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
3416
3417 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
3418
3419 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
3420 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
3421 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
3422 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
3423 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
3424 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
3425 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
3426 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
3427
3428       </div>
3429       <div class="tags">
3430
3431
3432         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3433
3434
3435       </div>
3436     </div>
3437     <div class="padding"></div>
3438
3439     <div class="entry">
3440       <div class="title">
3441         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
3442       </div>
3443       <div class="date">
3444          1st March 2017
3445       </div>
3446       <div class="body">
3447         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
3448 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
3449 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
3450 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
3451 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
3452 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
3453 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
3454 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
3455 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
3456 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
3457 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
3458
3459 <blockquote><pre>
3460 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3461   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
3462   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
3463      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3464      sleep 1; \
3465   done
3466 300
3467 0+1 oppføringer inn
3468 0+1 oppføringer ut
3469 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
3470 4
3471 8
3472 12
3473 17
3474 21
3475 %
3476 </pre></blockquote>
3477
3478 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
3479 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
3480 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
3481 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
3482
3483 <blockquote><pre>
3484 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3485   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
3486   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
3487      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3488      sleep 1; \
3489   done
3490 1079
3491 0+1 oppføringer inn
3492 0+1 oppføringer ut
3493 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
3494 433
3495 1028
3496 1031
3497 1035
3498 1038
3499 %
3500 </pre></blockquote>
3501
3502 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
3503 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
3504
3505 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
3506 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
3507 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
3508 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
3509 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
3510 post.</p>
3511
3512       </div>
3513       <div class="tags">
3514
3515
3516         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3517
3518
3519       </div>
3520     </div>
3521     <div class="padding"></div>
3522
3523     <div class="entry">
3524       <div class="title">
3525         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
3526       </div>
3527       <div class="date">
3528          9th January 2017
3529       </div>
3530       <div class="body">
3531         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
3532 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
3533 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
3534 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
3535 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
3536 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
3537 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
3538 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
3539 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
3540 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
3541 this:
3542
3543 <p><pre>
3544 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
3545  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
3546  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
3547  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
3548  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
3549  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
3550  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
3551  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
3552  8  * * *
3553  9  * * *
3554 [...]
3555 </pre></p>
3556
3557 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
3558 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
3559 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
3560 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
3561 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
3562 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
3563 traceroute request.</p>
3564
3565 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
3566 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
3567 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
3568 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
3569 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
3570
3571 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
3572 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
3573 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
3574 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
3575 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
3576 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
3577 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
3578 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
3579 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
3580
3581 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
3582 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
3583 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
3584 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
3585 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
3586 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
3587 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
3588 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
3589 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
3590 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
3591 render the page (in HAR format using
3592 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
3593 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
3594 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
3595 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
3596 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
3597
3598 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
3599 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
3600
3601 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
3602 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
3603 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
3604 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
3605 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
3606 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
3607 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
3608 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
3609 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
3610 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
3611 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
3612 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
3613 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
3614 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
3615
3616 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
3617 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
3618
3619 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
3620 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
3621 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
3622 question.
3623 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
3624 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
3625 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
3626 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
3627 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
3628 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
3629 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
3630
3631 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
3632 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
3633
3634 <p>In the process, I came across the
3635 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
3636 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
3637 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
3638 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
3639 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
3640 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
3641 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
3642 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
3643 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
3644 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
3645 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
3646 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
3647 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
3648 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
3649
3650 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
3651 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
3652
3653 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
3654 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
3655 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
3656 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
3657
3658 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
3659 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
3660 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
3661 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
3662 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
3663 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
3664 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
3665
3666 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
3667 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
3668 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
3669 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
3670 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
3671 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
3672 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
3673
3674 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
3675 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
3676 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
3677 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
3678
3679 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3680 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3681 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3682
3683       </div>
3684       <div class="tags">
3685
3686
3687         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3688
3689
3690       </div>
3691     </div>
3692     <div class="padding"></div>
3693
3694     <div class="entry">
3695       <div class="title">
3696         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
3697       </div>
3698       <div class="date">
3699         23rd December 2016
3700       </div>
3701       <div class="body">
3702         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
3703 readers probably know, I have been working on the
3704 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
3705 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
3706 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
3707 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
3708 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
3709 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
3710 metadata format.  And today,
3711 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
3712 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
3713 ie using fnmatch():</p>
3714
3715 <p><pre>
3716 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
3717   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
3718 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
3719 Name: pymissile
3720 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
3721 Package: pymissile
3722 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
3723 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
3724 Name: libnxt
3725 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
3726 Package: libnxt
3727 ---
3728 Identifier: t2n [generic]
3729 Name: t2n
3730 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
3731 Package: t2n
3732 ---
3733 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
3734 Name: python-nxt
3735 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
3736 Package: python-nxt
3737 ---
3738 Identifier: nbc [generic]
3739 Name: nbc
3740 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
3741 Package: nbc
3742 %
3743 </pre></p>
3744
3745 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
3746 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
3747
3748 <p><pre>
3749 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
3750 pymissile
3751 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
3752 libnxt
3753 nbc
3754 python-nxt
3755 t2n
3756 %
3757 </pre></p>
3758
3759 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
3760 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
3761
3762 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
3763 make the most of the hardware they have, please
3764 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
3765 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
3766 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
3767 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
3768 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
3769 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
3770 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
3771 part of my involvement in
3772 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
3773 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
3774 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
3775 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
3776 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
3777 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
3778 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
3779 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
3780 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
3781
3782 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3783 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3784 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3785
3786       </div>
3787       <div class="tags">
3788
3789
3790         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3791
3792
3793       </div>
3794     </div>
3795     <div class="padding"></div>
3796
3797     <div class="entry">
3798       <div class="title">
3799         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
3800       </div>
3801       <div class="date">
3802         20th December 2016
3803       </div>
3804       <div class="body">
3805         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
3806 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
3807 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
3808 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
3809 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
3810 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
3811 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
3812 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
3813 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
3814 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
3815
3816 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
3817
3818 <p><pre>
3819 % isenkram-lookup
3820 bluez
3821 cheese
3822 ethtool
3823 fprintd
3824 fprintd-demo
3825 gkrellm-thinkbat
3826 hdapsd
3827 libpam-fprintd
3828 pidgin-blinklight
3829 thinkfan
3830 tlp
3831 tp-smapi-dkms
3832 tp-smapi-source
3833 tpb
3834 %
3835 </pre></p>
3836
3837 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
3838 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
3839 I have all the firmware my machine need:
3840
3841 <p><pre>
3842 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
3843 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
3844 %
3845 </pre></p>
3846
3847 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
3848 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
3849 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
3850 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
3851 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
3852 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
3853 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
3854 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
3855
3856 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
3857 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
3858 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
3859
3860 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
3861 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
3862 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
3863 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
3864 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
3865 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
3866 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
3867 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
3868 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
3869 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
3870 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
3871 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
3872 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
3873 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
3874 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
3875 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
3876 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
3877 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
3878 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
3879 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
3880 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
3881 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
3882 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
3883 zd1211-firmware</p>
3884
3885 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
3886 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
3887 maintainer to
3888 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
3889 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
3890 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
3891 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
3892
3893 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
3894 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
3895 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
3896 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
3897 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
3898
3899       </div>
3900       <div class="tags">
3901
3902
3903         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3904
3905
3906       </div>
3907     </div>
3908     <div class="padding"></div>
3909
3910     <div class="entry">
3911       <div class="title">
3912         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
3913       </div>
3914       <div class="date">
3915         11th December 2016
3916       </div>
3917       <div class="body">
3918         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
3919
3920 <p>In my early years, I played
3921 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
3922 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
3923 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
3924 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
3925 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
3926 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
3927 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
3928 small.</p>
3929
3930 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
3931 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
3932 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
3933 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
3934 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
3935 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
3936 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
3937 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
3938 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
3939
3940 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
3941 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
3942 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
3943 advantages of the
3944 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
3945 where information about each planet is easily available with common
3946 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
3947 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
3948 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
3949 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
3950 after less then a week.</p>
3951
3952 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
3953 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
3954 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
3955
3956 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3957 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3958 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3959
3960       </div>
3961       <div class="tags">
3962
3963
3964         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3965
3966
3967       </div>
3968     </div>
3969     <div class="padding"></div>
3970
3971     <div class="entry">
3972       <div class="title">
3973         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
3974       </div>
3975       <div class="date">
3976         25th November 2016
3977       </div>
3978       <div class="body">
3979         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
3980 installation system, observing how using
3981 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
3982 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
3983 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
3984 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
3985 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
3986 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
3987 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
3988 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
3989 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
3990 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
3991 up the process make perfect sense.
3992
3993 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
3994 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
3995 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
3996 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
3997 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
3998 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
3999 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
4000 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
4001 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
4002 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
4003
4004 <blockquote><pre>
4005 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
4006 </pre></blockquote>
4007
4008 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
4009 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
4010 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
4011 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
4012 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
4013 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
4014 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
4015 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
4016 tested its impact.</p>
4017
4018
4019       </div>
4020       <div class="tags">
4021
4022
4023         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4024
4025
4026       </div>
4027     </div>
4028     <div class="padding"></div>
4029
4030     <div class="entry">
4031       <div class="title">
4032         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oversette_bokm_l_til_nynorsk__enklere_enn_du_tror_takket_v_re_Apertium.html">Oversette bokmål til nynorsk, enklere enn du tror takket være Apertium</a>
4033       </div>
4034       <div class="date">
4035         24th November 2016
4036       </div>
4037       <div class="body">
4038         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
4039 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
4040 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
4041 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
4042 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
4043 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
4044 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
4045 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
4046 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
4047 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
4048 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
4049 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
4050 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
4051 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
4052 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
4053 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
4054 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
4055 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
4056 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
4057
4058 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
4059 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
4060 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
4061 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
4062 api.apertium.org.  Se
4063 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
4064 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
4065 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
4066 nynorsk.</p>
4067
4068 <hr/>
4069
4070 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
4071 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
4072 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
4073 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
4074 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
4075 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
4076 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
4077 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
4078 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
4079 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
4080 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
4081 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
4082 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
4083 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
4084 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
4085 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
4086 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
4087 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
4088 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
4089
4090 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
4091 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
4092 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
4093 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
4094 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
4095 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
4096 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
4097 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
4098 nynorsk.</p>
4099
4100       </div>
4101       <div class="tags">
4102
4103
4104         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
4105
4106
4107       </div>
4108     </div>
4109     <div class="padding"></div>
4110
4111     <div class="entry">
4112       <div class="title">
4113         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
4114       </div>
4115       <div class="date">
4116         13th November 2016
4117       </div>
4118       <div class="body">
4119         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
4120 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
4121 multi-threaded program, finally
4122 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
4123 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
4124 months since
4125 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
4126 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
4127 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
4128 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
4129 JavaScript libraries.</p>
4130
4131 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
4132
4133 <p><blockquote>
4134 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
4135 </blockquote></p>
4136
4137 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
4138 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
4139 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
4140 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
4141 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
4142
4143 <p><blockquote>
4144 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
4145 </blockquote></p>
4146
4147 <p>See the project home page and the
4148 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
4149 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
4150 working.</p>
4151
4152       </div>
4153       <div class="tags">
4154
4155
4156         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4157
4158
4159       </div>
4160     </div>
4161     <div class="padding"></div>
4162
4163     <div class="entry">
4164       <div class="title">
4165         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
4166       </div>
4167       <div class="date">
4168          4th November 2016
4169       </div>
4170       <div class="body">
4171         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
4172 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
4173 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
4174 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
4175 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
4176 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
4177 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
4178 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
4179 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
4180 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
4181 and had
4182 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
4183 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
4184 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
4185 loved ones. :)</p>
4186
4187 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
4188 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
4189 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
4190 building
4191 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
4192 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
4193 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
4194 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
4195 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
4196 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
4197 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
4198 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
4199
4200 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
4201
4202 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
4203 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
4204 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
4205 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
4206 the battery status run low:</p>
4207
4208 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
4209    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
4210 </video></p>
4211
4212 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
4213 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
4214
4215 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
4216 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
4217 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
4218 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
4219 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
4220 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
4221 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
4222 should.</p>
4223
4224       </div>
4225       <div class="tags">
4226
4227
4228         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4229
4230
4231       </div>
4232     </div>
4233     <div class="padding"></div>
4234
4235     <div class="entry">
4236       <div class="title">
4237         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
4238       </div>
4239       <div class="date">
4240         10th October 2016
4241       </div>
4242       <div class="body">
4243         <p>In July
4244 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
4245 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
4246 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
4247 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
4248
4249 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
4250 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
4251 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
4252 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
4253 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
4254 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
4255 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
4256 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
4257 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
4258 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
4259 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
4260 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
4261 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
4262 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
4263 time.</p>
4264
4265 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
4266 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
4267 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
4268 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
4269 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
4270 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
4271 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
4272
4273 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
4274 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
4275 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
4276 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
4277 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
4278 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
4279 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
4280 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
4281 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
4282 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
4283
4284 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
4285
4286 <ol>
4287
4288 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
4289 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
4290 know, so you need to install it.
4291
4292 <pre>
4293 apt install git tor chromium
4294 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4295 </pre></li>
4296
4297 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
4298 block below.</li>
4299
4300 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
4301 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
4302
4303 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
4304 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
4305 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
4306 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
4307 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
4308
4309 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
4310 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
4311 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
4312 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
4313 a associated contact database.</li>
4314
4315 </ol>
4316
4317 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
4318 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
4319 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
4320 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
4321 example
4322 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
4323 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
4324 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
4325 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
4326 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
4327 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
4328 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
4329 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
4330 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
4331 working on Debian Stable.</p>
4332
4333 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
4334 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
4335 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
4336
4337 <pre>
4338 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
4339 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
4340 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
4341 --- a/js/background.js
4342 +++ b/js/background.js
4343 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
4344          });
4345      });
4346
4347 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
4348 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
4349      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
4350 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
4351 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
4352      var messageReceiver;
4353      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
4354          if (messageReceiver) {
4355 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
4356 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
4357 --- a/js/expire.js
4358 +++ b/js/expire.js
4359 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
4360  ;(function() {
4361      'use strict';
4362 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
4363 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
4364
4365      window.extension = window.extension || {};
4366
4367 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
4368 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
4369 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
4370 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
4371 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
4372              return {
4373                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
4374                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
4375 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
4376 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
4377 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
4378              };
4379          },
4380          clearQR: function() {
4381 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
4382 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
4383 --- a/options.html
4384 +++ b/options.html
4385 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
4386          &lt;div class='nav'>
4387            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
4388            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
4389 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
4390 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
4391 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
4392 +
4393 +         &lt;/div>
4394            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
4395            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
4396            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
4397 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
4398 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
4399 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
4400 +#!/bin/sh
4401 +set -e
4402 +cd $(dirname $0)
4403 +mkdir -p userdata
4404 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
4405 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
4406 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
4407 +fi
4408 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
4409 +exec chromium \
4410 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
4411 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
4412 EOF
4413 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
4414 </pre>
4415
4416 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4417 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4418 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4419
4420       </div>
4421       <div class="tags">
4422
4423
4424         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4425
4426
4427       </div>
4428     </div>
4429     <div class="padding"></div>
4430
4431     <div class="entry">
4432       <div class="title">
4433         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
4434       </div>
4435       <div class="date">
4436          7th October 2016
4437       </div>
4438       <div class="body">
4439         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
4440 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
4441 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
4442 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
4443 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
4444 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
4445 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
4446 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
4447 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
4448 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
4449 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
4450 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
4451 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
4452
4453 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
4454 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
4455 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
4456 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
4457 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
4458 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
4459
4460 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
4461 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
4462 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
4463 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
4464 identifiers.</p>
4465
4466 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
4467 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
4468 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
4469 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
4470 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
4471 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
4472 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
4473 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
4474 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
4475 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
4476 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
4477 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
4478 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
4479 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
4480
4481 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
4482 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
4483 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
4484 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
4485 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
4486 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
4487 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
4488
4489 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
4490 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
4491 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
4492 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
4493 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
4494 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
4495 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
4496 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
4497 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
4498 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
4499 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
4500 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
4501 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
4502 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
4503 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
4504 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
4505 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
4506
4507 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
4508 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
4509 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
4510 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
4511 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
4512 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
4513 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
4514
4515 <p><pre>
4516 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
4517     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
4518 </pre></p>
4519
4520 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
4521 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
4522 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
4523 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
4524 to detect this?</p>
4525
4526 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
4527 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
4528 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
4529 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
4530 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
4531 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
4532 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
4533 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
4534 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
4535 directly if no such class exist.</p>
4536
4537 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4538 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
4539 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
4540
4541 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
4542 please join us on our IRC channel
4543 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
4544 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
4545 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
4546 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
4547
4548 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4549 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4550 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4551
4552       </div>
4553       <div class="tags">
4554
4555
4556         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
4557
4558
4559       </div>
4560     </div>
4561     <div class="padding"></div>
4562
4563     <div class="entry">
4564       <div class="title">
4565         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
4566       </div>
4567       <div class="date">
4568         30th August 2016
4569       </div>
4570       <div class="body">
4571         <p>In April we
4572 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
4573 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
4574 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
4575 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
4576 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
4577 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
4578 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
4579 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
4580 contributing using
4581 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
4582 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
4583 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
4584 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
4585 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
4586 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
4587 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
4588
4589 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
4590 electronic form.</p>
4591
4592       </div>
4593       <div class="tags">
4594
4595
4596         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4597
4598
4599       </div>
4600     </div>
4601     <div class="padding"></div>
4602
4603     <div class="entry">
4604       <div class="title">
4605         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
4606       </div>
4607       <div class="date">
4608         11th August 2016
4609       </div>
4610       <div class="body">
4611         <p>This summer, I read a great article
4612 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
4613 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
4614 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
4615 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
4616 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
4617 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
4618 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
4619 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
4620 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
4621 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
4622 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
4623 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
4624
4625 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
4626 get the system into Debian.  I
4627 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
4628 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
4629 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
4630 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
4631 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
4632 profiling information included in the source package.
4633 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
4634
4635 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
4636 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
4637
4638 <p><blockquote><pre>
4639 coz run --- program-to-run
4640 </pre></blockquote></p>
4641
4642 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
4643 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
4644 most, use a web browser and either point it to
4645 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
4646 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
4647 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
4648 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
4649 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
4650 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
4651 targeted experiments.</p>
4652
4653 <p>A video published by ACM
4654 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
4655 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
4656 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
4657 titled
4658 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
4659 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
4660
4661 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
4662 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
4663 because it uses a
4664 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
4665 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
4666 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
4667 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
4668
4669 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
4670 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
4671 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
4672 C++ libraries.</p>
4673
4674       </div>
4675       <div class="tags">
4676
4677
4678         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4679
4680
4681       </div>
4682     </div>
4683     <div class="padding"></div>
4684
4685     <div class="entry">
4686       <div class="title">
4687         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
4688       </div>
4689       <div class="date">
4690          7th July 2016
4691       </div>
4692       <div class="body">
4693         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
4694 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
4695 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
4696 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
4697 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
4698 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
4699 microphone The initial idea had been to just
4700 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
4701 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
4702 until a few days ago.</p>
4703
4704 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
4705 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
4706 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
4707 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
4708 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
4709 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
4710 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
4711
4712 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
4713 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
4714 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
4715 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
4716 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
4717 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
4718 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
4719 him.</p>
4720
4721 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
4722 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
4723 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
4724 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
4725 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
4726 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
4727 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
4728 devices it would work for.</p>
4729
4730 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
4731 followed some instructions
4732 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
4733 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
4734 machine with Debian testing:</p>
4735
4736 <p><pre>
4737 adb reboot-bootloader
4738 fastboot oem rebootRUU
4739 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4740 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4741 fastboot reboot
4742 </pre></p>
4743
4744 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
4745 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
4746 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
4747 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
4748 too.</p>
4749
4750 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
4751 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
4752 like this:</p>
4753
4754 <p><pre>
4755 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
4756 </pre>
4757
4758 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
4759 this:</p>
4760
4761 <p><pre>
4762 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
4763 </pre></p>
4764
4765 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
4766 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
4767 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
4768 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
4769 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
4770
4771       </div>
4772       <div class="tags">
4773
4774
4775         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4776
4777
4778       </div>
4779     </div>
4780     <div class="padding"></div>
4781
4782     <div class="entry">
4783       <div class="title">
4784         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
4785       </div>
4786       <div class="date">
4787          3rd July 2016
4788       </div>
4789       <div class="body">
4790         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
4791 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
4792 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
4793 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
4794 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
4795 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
4796 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
4797 Github source, compared it to the source in
4798 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
4799 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
4800 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
4801 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
4802 the recipe how I did it.</p>
4803
4804 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
4805
4806 <pre>
4807 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4808 </pre>
4809
4810 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
4811 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
4812
4813 <pre>
4814 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
4815 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
4816 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4817 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4818 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
4819          });
4820      });
4821
4822 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
4823 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
4824 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
4825 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
4826      var messageReceiver;
4827      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
4828          if (messageReceiver) {
4829 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
4830 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4831 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4832 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
4833  ;(function() {
4834      'use strict';
4835 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
4836 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
4837
4838      window.extension = window.extension || {};
4839
4840 EOF
4841 </pre>
4842
4843 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
4844 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
4845 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
4846 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
4847
4848 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
4849 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
4850
4851 <pre>
4852 #!/bin/sh
4853 cd $(dirname $0)
4854 mkdir -p userdata
4855 exec chromium \
4856   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
4857   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
4858 </pre>
4859
4860 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
4861 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
4862 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
4863 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
4864 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
4865
4866 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
4867 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
4868 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
4869 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
4870 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
4871 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
4872 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
4873 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
4874 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
4875 Signal from my laptop.
4876
4877 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
4878 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
4879 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
4880 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
4881 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
4882 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
4883 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
4884 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
4885 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
4886 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
4887 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
4888 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
4889
4890 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
4891 on this topic in
4892 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
4893 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
4894 phone</a>.</p>
4895
4896       </div>
4897       <div class="tags">
4898
4899
4900         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4901
4902
4903       </div>
4904     </div>
4905     <div class="padding"></div>
4906
4907     <div class="entry">
4908       <div class="title">
4909         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
4910       </div>
4911       <div class="date">
4912          6th June 2016
4913       </div>
4914       <div class="body">
4915         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
4916 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
4917 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
4918 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
4919 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
4920 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
4921 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
4922 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
4923 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
4924
4925 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
4926 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
4927 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
4928 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
4929 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
4930 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
4931 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
4932
4933 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
4934 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
4935 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
4936 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
4937 toten and parole.</p>
4938
4939 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
4940 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
4941 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
4942 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
4943 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
4944 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
4945 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
4946 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
4947 formats.</p>
4948
4949       </div>
4950       <div class="tags">
4951
4952
4953         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4954
4955
4956       </div>
4957     </div>
4958     <div class="padding"></div>
4959
4960     <div class="entry">
4961       <div class="title">
4962         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
4963       </div>
4964       <div class="date">
4965          5th June 2016
4966       </div>
4967       <div class="body">
4968         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
4969 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
4970 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
4971 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
4972 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
4973 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
4974 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
4975 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
4976 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
4977 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
4978 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
4979 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
4980 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
4981 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
4982 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
4983 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
4984 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
4985 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
4986 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
4987 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
4988
4989 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
4990 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
4991 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
4992 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
4993 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
4994 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
4995 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
4996 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
4997 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
4998 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
4999 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
5000 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
5001 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
5002 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
5003
5004 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
5005 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
5006 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
5007 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
5008 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
5009 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
5010 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
5011 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
5012
5013 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
5014 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
5015 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
5016 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
5017 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
5018 information is collected from
5019 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
5020 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
5021 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
5022 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
5023 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
5024 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
5025 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
5026 type (preferably
5027 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
5028 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
5029 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
5030 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
5031
5032 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
5033 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
5034 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
5035
5036 <p><blockquote><pre>
5037 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
5038 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
5039   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
5040     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
5041     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
5042     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
5043   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
5044 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
5045 </pre></blockquote></p>
5046
5047 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
5048 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
5049 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
5050 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
5051
5052 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
5053 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
5054 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
5055
5056 <p><blockquote><pre>
5057 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
5058 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
5059 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
5060 %
5061 </pre></blockquote></p>
5062
5063 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
5064 MimeType= line.</p>
5065
5066 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
5067 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
5068 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
5069 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
5070 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
5071 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
5072 fixed. :)</p>
5073
5074       </div>
5075       <div class="tags">
5076
5077
5078         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5079
5080
5081       </div>
5082     </div>
5083     <div class="padding"></div>
5084
5085     <div class="entry">
5086       <div class="title">
5087         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
5088       </div>
5089       <div class="date">
5090         25th May 2016
5091       </div>
5092       <div class="body">
5093         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
5094 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
5095 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
5096 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
5097 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
5098 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
5099 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
5100 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
5101 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
5102 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
5103 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
5104 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
5105
5106 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
5107 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
5108 is going away and is generally being replaced by
5109 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
5110 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
5111 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
5112 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
5113 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
5114 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
5115 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
5116 and see if it is recognised.</p>
5117
5118 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
5119 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
5120 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
5121
5122 <p><blockquote><pre>
5123 % isenkram-lookup
5124 bluez
5125 cheese
5126 fprintd
5127 fprintd-demo
5128 gkrellm-thinkbat
5129 hdapsd
5130 libpam-fprintd
5131 pidgin-blinklight
5132 thinkfan
5133 tleds
5134 tp-smapi-dkms
5135 tp-smapi-source
5136 tpb
5137 %p
5138 </pre></blockquote></p>
5139
5140 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
5141 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
5142 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
5143 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
5144 See
5145 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
5146 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
5147
5148       </div>
5149       <div class="tags">
5150
5151
5152         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5153
5154
5155       </div>
5156     </div>
5157     <div class="padding"></div>
5158
5159     <div class="entry">
5160       <div class="title">
5161         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
5162       </div>
5163       <div class="date">
5164         23rd May 2016
5165       </div>
5166       <div class="body">
5167         <p>Yesterday I updated the
5168 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
5169 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
5170 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
5171 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
5172 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
5173 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
5174 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
5175 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
5176 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
5177 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
5178
5179 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
5180 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
5181 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
5182 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
5183 capacity.</p>
5184
5185 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
5186
5187 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
5188 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
5189 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
5190 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
5191
5192 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
5193
5194 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
5195 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
5196 shrinking. :(</p>
5197
5198 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
5199 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
5200 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
5201 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
5202 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
5203 machine.</p>
5204
5205 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
5206 check out the
5207 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
5208 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
5209 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
5210 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5211 Patches are very welcome.</p>
5212
5213 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5214 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5215 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5216
5217       </div>
5218       <div class="tags">
5219
5220
5221         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5222
5223
5224       </div>
5225     </div>
5226     <div class="padding"></div>
5227
5228     <div class="entry">
5229       <div class="title">
5230         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
5231       </div>
5232       <div class="date">
5233         12th May 2016
5234       </div>
5235       <div class="body">
5236         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
5237 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
5238 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
5239 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
5240 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
5241 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5242 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
5243 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
5244 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
5245 great if you could help out with
5246 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
5247 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
5248
5249       </div>
5250       <div class="tags">
5251
5252
5253         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5254
5255
5256       </div>
5257     </div>
5258     <div class="padding"></div>
5259
5260     <div class="entry">
5261       <div class="title">
5262         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
5263       </div>
5264       <div class="date">
5265          8th May 2016
5266       </div>
5267       <div class="body">
5268         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
5269 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
5270
5271 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
5272 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
5273 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
5274 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
5275 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
5276 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
5277 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
5278 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
5279 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
5280 players.</p>
5281
5282 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
5283 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
5284 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
5285 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
5286 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
5287 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
5288 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
5289 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
5290 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
5291 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
5292 support most file formats.</p>
5293
5294 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
5295 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
5296 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
5297 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
5298 listed first in the table.</p>
5299
5300 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
5301 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
5302 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
5303 support?</p>
5304
5305       </div>
5306       <div class="tags">
5307
5308
5309         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
5310
5311
5312       </div>
5313     </div>
5314     <div class="padding"></div>
5315
5316     <div class="entry">
5317       <div class="title">
5318         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
5319       </div>
5320       <div class="date">
5321          4th May 2016
5322       </div>
5323       <div class="body">
5324         A friend of mine made me aware of
5325 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
5326 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
5327 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
5328
5329 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
5330 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
5331 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
5332 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
5333 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
5334 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
5335 production started.</p>
5336
5337 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
5338 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
5339 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
5340
5341       </div>
5342       <div class="tags">
5343
5344
5345         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5346
5347
5348       </div>
5349     </div>
5350     <div class="padding"></div>
5351
5352     <div class="entry">
5353       <div class="title">
5354         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
5355       </div>
5356       <div class="date">
5357         10th April 2016
5358       </div>
5359       <div class="body">
5360         <p>During this weekends
5361 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
5362 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
5363 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
5364 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
5365 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
5366 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
5367 contributing using
5368 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
5369 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
5370 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
5371 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
5372 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
5373 contributors</a>.</p>
5374
5375 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
5376 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
5377 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
5378 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
5379 available for many more languages.</p>
5380
5381       </div>
5382       <div class="tags">
5383
5384
5385         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5386
5387
5388       </div>
5389     </div>
5390     <div class="padding"></div>
5391
5392     <div class="entry">
5393       <div class="title">
5394         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
5395       </div>
5396       <div class="date">
5397          7th April 2016
5398       </div>
5399       <div class="body">
5400         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
5401 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
5402 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
5403 But I might be wrong.</p>
5404
5405 <p>According to
5406 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
5407 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
5408 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
5409 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
5410 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
5411 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
5412 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
5413 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
5414 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
5415 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
5416
5417 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
5418 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
5419 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
5420 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
5421 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
5422 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
5423 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
5424 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5425 team status page</a>, and
5426 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
5427 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
5428
5429 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
5430 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
5431 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
5432 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
5433 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
5434 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
5435 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
5436 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
5437 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
5438 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
5439 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
5440 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
5441
5442       </div>
5443       <div class="tags">
5444
5445
5446         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5447
5448
5449       </div>
5450     </div>
5451     <div class="padding"></div>
5452
5453     <div class="entry">
5454       <div class="title">
5455         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
5456       </div>
5457       <div class="date">
5458         23rd March 2016
5459       </div>
5460       <div class="body">
5461         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
5462 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
5463 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
5464 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
5465 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
5466 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
5467 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
5468 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
5469
5470 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
5471 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
5472 and lifetime prediction by running:
5473
5474 <p><pre>
5475 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
5476 </pre></p>
5477
5478 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
5479
5480 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
5481 entry yet):</p>
5482
5483 <p><pre>
5484 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
5485 </pre></p>
5486
5487 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
5488 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
5489 few years of data.</p>
5490
5491 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
5492 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
5493 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
5494 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
5495 know.  The issue is reported as
5496 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
5497 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
5498 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
5499 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
5500 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
5501
5502 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
5503 check out the
5504 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
5505 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
5506 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
5507 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5508 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
5509
5510       </div>
5511       <div class="tags">
5512
5513
5514         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5515
5516
5517       </div>
5518     </div>
5519     <div class="padding"></div>
5520
5521     <div class="entry">
5522       <div class="title">
5523         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
5524       </div>
5525       <div class="date">
5526         15th March 2016
5527       </div>
5528       <div class="body">
5529         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
5530 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
5531 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
5532 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
5533 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
5534 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
5535 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
5536 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
5537 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
5538 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
5539 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
5540
5541 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
5542 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
5543 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
5544 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
5545 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
5546 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
5547 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
5548 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
5549 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
5550 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
5551 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
5552
5553 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
5554
5555 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
5556 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
5557 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
5558 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
5559 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
5560 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
5561
5562 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
5563 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
5564 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
5565 and graphing.</p>
5566
5567 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
5568 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
5569 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
5570 on
5571 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5572 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
5573
5574       </div>
5575       <div class="tags">
5576
5577
5578         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5579
5580
5581       </div>
5582     </div>
5583     <div class="padding"></div>
5584
5585     <div class="entry">
5586       <div class="title">
5587         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
5588       </div>
5589       <div class="date">
5590         19th February 2016
5591       </div>
5592       <div class="body">
5593         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
5594 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
5595 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
5596 the code in the package in question, preferably in
5597 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
5598 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
5599
5600 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
5601 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
5602 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
5603 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
5604 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
5605 out what was wrong with
5606 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
5607 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
5608 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
5609 semi-automatically.</p>
5610
5611 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
5612 file based on the code in the source package,
5613 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
5614 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
5615 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
5616 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
5617 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
5618 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
5619 option in
5620 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
5621 blog posts from 2014</a>.
5622
5623 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
5624
5625 <p><pre>
5626 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
5627 </pre></p>
5628
5629 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
5630 this might not be the best option.</p>
5631
5632 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
5633 this approach in
5634 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
5635 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
5636 dpkg-copyright' option:
5637
5638 <p><pre>
5639 cme update dpkg-copyright
5640 </pre></p>
5641
5642 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
5643 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
5644
5645 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
5646 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
5647 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
5648 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
5649 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
5650 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
5651 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
5652 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
5653 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
5654 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
5655
5656 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
5657 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
5658 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
5659 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
5660
5661 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
5662 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
5663 planet.debian.org.</p>
5664
5665 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5666 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5667 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5668
5669 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
5670 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
5671
5672 <p><pre>
5673 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
5674   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
5675 </pre></p>
5676
5677 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
5678 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
5679 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
5680 with my packages in the future.</p>
5681
5682 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
5683 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
5684 command line.</p>
5685
5686       </div>
5687       <div class="tags">
5688
5689
5690         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5691
5692
5693       </div>
5694     </div>
5695     <div class="padding"></div>
5696
5697     <div class="entry">
5698       <div class="title">
5699         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
5700       </div>
5701       <div class="date">
5702          4th February 2016
5703       </div>
5704       <div class="body">
5705         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
5706 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
5707 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
5708 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
5709 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
5710 about. :)</p>
5711
5712 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
5713 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
5714 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
5715 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
5716 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
5717 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
5718
5719 <blockquote><pre>
5720 % apt install appstream
5721 [...]
5722 % apt update
5723 [...]
5724 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
5725   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5726 firmware-qlogic
5727 %
5728 </pre></blockquote>
5729
5730 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
5731 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
5732 a way appstream can use.</p>
5733
5734 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
5735 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
5736 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
5737 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
5738 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
5739 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
5740
5741 <blockquote><pre>
5742 % apt install appstream
5743 [...]
5744 % apt update
5745 [...]
5746 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
5747   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5748 bkchem
5749 phototonic
5750 inkscape
5751 shutter
5752 tetzle
5753 geeqie
5754 xia
5755 pinta
5756 gthumb
5757 karbon
5758 comix
5759 mirage
5760 viewnior
5761 postr
5762 ristretto
5763 kolourpaint4
5764 eog
5765 eom
5766 gimagereader
5767 midori
5768 %
5769 </pre></blockquote>
5770
5771 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
5772 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
5773
5774       </div>
5775       <div class="tags">
5776
5777
5778         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5779
5780
5781       </div>
5782     </div>
5783     <div class="padding"></div>
5784
5785     <div class="entry">
5786       <div class="title">
5787         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
5788       </div>
5789       <div class="date">
5790         24th January 2016
5791       </div>
5792       <div class="body">
5793         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
5794 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
5795 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
5796 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
5797 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
5798 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
5799 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
5800 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
5801 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
5802 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
5803 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
5804 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
5805 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
5806 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
5807 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
5808 entities.</p>
5809
5810 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
5811
5812 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
5813 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
5814 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
5815 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
5816 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
5817 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
5818 tool to do so is called
5819 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
5820 discovered it when I read
5821 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
5822 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
5823 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
5824 The python program was in Debian, but
5825 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
5826 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
5827 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
5828 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
5829 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
5830 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
5831 are now included
5832 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
5833
5834 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
5835 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
5836 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
5837 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
5838 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
5839 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
5840 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
5841 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
5842 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
5843 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
5844 about yourself with the services.</p>
5845
5846 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
5847 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
5848 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
5849 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
5850 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
5851 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
5852 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
5853 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
5854 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
5855 things.  A similar technique have been
5856 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
5857 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
5858 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
5859 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
5860 public.</p>
5861
5862 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
5863 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
5864 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
5865 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
5866
5867 <p>(I have uploaded
5868 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
5869 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
5870 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
5871
5872       </div>
5873       <div class="tags">
5874
5875
5876         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5877
5878
5879       </div>
5880     </div>
5881     <div class="padding"></div>
5882
5883     <div class="entry">
5884       <div class="title">
5885         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
5886       </div>
5887       <div class="date">
5888         15th January 2016
5889       </div>
5890       <div class="body">
5891         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
5892 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
5893 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
5894 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
5895 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
5896 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
5897 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
5898 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
5899 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
5900 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
5901 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
5902 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
5903 was not the first to propose this, as the
5904 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
5905 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
5906 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
5907 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
5908
5909 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
5910 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
5911 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
5912 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
5913 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
5914
5915 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
5916 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
5917 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
5918 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
5919 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
5920 done in /etc/.</p>
5921
5922 <blockquote><pre>
5923 apt install apt-transport-tor
5924 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5925 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5926 </pre></blockquote>
5927
5928 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
5929 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
5930 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
5931 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
5932
5933 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
5934 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
5935 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
5936 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
5937 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
5938 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
5939
5940 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
5941 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
5942 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
5943 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
5944 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
5945
5946 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
5947 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
5948 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
5949 system.</p>
5950
5951       </div>
5952       <div class="tags">
5953
5954
5955         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5956
5957
5958       </div>
5959     </div>
5960     <div class="padding"></div>
5961
5962     <div class="entry">
5963       <div class="title">
5964         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
5965       </div>
5966       <div class="date">
5967         23rd December 2015
5968       </div>
5969       <div class="body">
5970         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
5971 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
5972 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
5973 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
5974 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
5975 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
5976
5977 <p>A few days I came across
5978 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
5979 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
5980 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
5981 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
5982 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
5983 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
5984 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
5985 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
5986 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
5987 discovered the developer
5988 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
5989 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
5990 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
5991 archive.</p>
5992
5993 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
5994 it into Debian, where it currently
5995 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
5996 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
5997
5998 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
5999 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
6000 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
6001 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
6002 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
6003 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
6004 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
6005 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
6006 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
6007 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
6008 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
6009 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
6010
6011 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
6012 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
6013 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
6014 package show up in unstable.</p>
6015
6016       </div>
6017       <div class="tags">
6018
6019
6020         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
6021
6022
6023       </div>
6024     </div>
6025     <div class="padding"></div>
6026
6027     <div class="entry">
6028       <div class="title">
6029         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
6030       </div>
6031       <div class="date">
6032         20th December 2015
6033       </div>
6034       <div class="body">
6035         <p>Around three years ago, I created
6036 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
6037 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
6038 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
6039 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
6040 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
6041 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
6042 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
6043 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
6044 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
6045 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
6046 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
6047 with.</p>
6048
6049 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
6050 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
6051 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
6052 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
6053 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
6054 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
6055 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
6056 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
6057 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
6058 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
6059 Debian version of appstream.</p>
6060
6061 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
6062 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
6063 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
6064 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
6065 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
6066 how do add the required
6067 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
6068 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
6069 this content:</p>
6070
6071 <blockquote><pre>
6072 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
6073 &lt;component&gt;
6074   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
6075   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
6076   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
6077   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
6078   &lt;description&gt;
6079     &lt;p&gt;
6080       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
6081       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
6082       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
6083       launcher.
6084     &lt;/p&gt;
6085   &lt;/description&gt;
6086   &lt;provides&gt;
6087     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
6088   &lt;/provides&gt;
6089 &lt;/component&gt;
6090 </pre></blockquote>
6091
6092 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
6093 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
6094 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
6095 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
6096 0202.</p>
6097
6098 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
6099 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
6100 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
6101 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
6102 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
6103 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
6104 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
6105 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
6106
6107 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
6108 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
6109 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
6110 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
6111 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
6112
6113 <blockquote><pre>
6114 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
6115 </pre></blockquote>
6116
6117 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
6118 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
6119 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
6120 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
6121 question.</p>
6122
6123 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
6124 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
6125
6126 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
6127 try running this command on the command line:</p>
6128
6129 <blockquote><pre>
6130 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
6131 </pre></blockquote>
6132
6133 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6134 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6135 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6136
6137       </div>
6138       <div class="tags">
6139
6140
6141         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6142
6143
6144       </div>
6145     </div>
6146     <div class="padding"></div>
6147
6148     <div class="entry">
6149       <div class="title">
6150         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
6151       </div>
6152       <div class="date">
6153         30th November 2015
6154       </div>
6155       <div class="body">
6156         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
6157 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
6158 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
6159 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
6160 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
6161
6162 <blockquote>
6163
6164 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
6165
6166 <blockquote>
6167 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
6168
6169 The first step is to choose a
6170 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
6171 code.<br/>
6172
6173 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
6174 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
6175
6176 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
6177 work<br/>
6178
6179 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
6180 </blockquote>
6181
6182 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
6183 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
6184 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
6185 0x57</a></small></p>
6186
6187 <p>As the Debian Website
6188 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
6189 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
6190 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
6191 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
6192 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
6193 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
6194 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
6195 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
6196 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
6197 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
6198 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
6199 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
6200 Freedom">FaiF</a>
6201 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
6202 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
6203 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
6204 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
6205 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
6206 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
6207 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
6208 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
6209 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
6210 In March the SFC supported a
6211 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
6212 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
6213 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
6214 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
6215 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
6216 conferences
6217 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
6218 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
6219 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
6220 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
6221 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
6222 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
6223 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
6224 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
6225 Software.</p>
6226
6227 <p>If you support Free Software,
6228 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
6229 what the SFC do, agree with their
6230 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
6231 principles</a>, are happy about their
6232 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
6233 work on a project that is an SFC
6234 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
6235 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
6236 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
6237 Allan Webber</a>,
6238 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
6239 Smith</a>,
6240 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
6241 Bacon</a>, myself and
6242 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
6243 becoming a
6244 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
6245 next week your donation will be
6246 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
6247 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
6248 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
6249 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
6250 social media accounts.</p>
6251
6252 </blockquote>
6253
6254 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
6255 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
6256 supporter too?</p>
6257
6258       </div>
6259       <div class="tags">
6260
6261
6262         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
6263
6264
6265       </div>
6266     </div>
6267     <div class="padding"></div>
6268
6269     <div class="entry">
6270       <div class="title">
6271         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
6272       </div>
6273       <div class="date">
6274         17th November 2015
6275       </div>
6276       <div class="body">
6277         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
6278 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
6279 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
6280 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
6281 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
6282 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
6283 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
6284 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
6285 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
6286 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
6287
6288 <pre>
6289 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
6290       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
6291 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
6292 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
6293 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6294 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6295 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6296 </pre>
6297
6298 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
6299 my old key.</p>
6300
6301 <p>If you signed my old key
6302 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
6303 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
6304 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
6305 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
6306
6307       </div>
6308       <div class="tags">
6309
6310
6311         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6312
6313
6314       </div>
6315     </div>
6316     <div class="padding"></div>
6317
6318     <div class="entry">
6319       <div class="title">
6320         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
6321       </div>
6322       <div class="date">
6323         24th September 2015
6324       </div>
6325       <div class="body">
6326         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
6327 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
6328 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
6329 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
6330 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
6331 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
6332 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
6333
6334 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
6335
6336 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
6337 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
6338 by someone else.  I found
6339 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
6340 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
6341 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
6342 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
6343 from him.  Via
6344 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
6345 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
6346 discovered
6347 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
6348 available in Debian.</p>
6349
6350 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
6351 battery stats ever since. Now my
6352 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
6353 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
6354 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
6355 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
6356
6357 <pre>
6358 #!/bin/sh
6359 # Inspired by
6360 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
6361 # See also
6362 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
6363 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
6364
6365 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
6366     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
6367
6368 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
6369     (
6370         printf "timestamp,"
6371         for f in $files; do
6372             printf "%s," $f
6373         done
6374         echo
6375     ) > "$logfile"
6376 fi
6377
6378 log_battery() {
6379     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
6380     # when several log processes run in parallel.
6381     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
6382         for f in $files; do \
6383             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
6384         done)
6385     echo "$msg"
6386 }
6387
6388 cd /sys/class/power_supply
6389
6390 for bat in BAT*; do
6391     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
6392 done
6393 </pre>
6394
6395 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
6396 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
6397 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
6398 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
6399 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
6400 The code for the Debian package
6401 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
6402 available on github</a>.</p>
6403
6404 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
6405
6406 <pre>
6407 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
6408 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
6409 [...]
6410 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6411 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6412 </pre>
6413
6414 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
6415 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
6416 battery.</p>
6417
6418 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
6419 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
6420 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
6421 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
6422 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
6423 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
6424 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
6425 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
6426 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
6427 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
6428 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
6429 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
6430 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
6431 Linux too.</p>
6432
6433 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
6434 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
6435 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
6436 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
6437 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
6438 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
6439 load).</p>
6440
6441 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
6442 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
6443 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
6444 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
6445 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
6446 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
6447 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
6448 those.</p>
6449
6450 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
6451 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
6452 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
6453 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
6454 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
6455 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
6456 specific.</p>
6457
6458       </div>
6459       <div class="tags">
6460
6461
6462         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6463
6464
6465       </div>
6466     </div>
6467     <div class="padding"></div>
6468
6469     <div class="entry">
6470       <div class="title">
6471         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
6472       </div>
6473       <div class="date">
6474          5th July 2015
6475       </div>
6476       <div class="body">
6477         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
6478 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
6479 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
6480 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
6481 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
6482 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
6483 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
6484 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
6485 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
6486 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
6487 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
6488
6489 <p>One tip I got was to use the
6490 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
6491 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
6492 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
6493 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
6494 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
6495 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
6496
6497 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
6498 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
6499 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
6500 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
6501 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
6502 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
6503 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
6504 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
6505 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
6506 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
6507 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
6508 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
6509 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
6510 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
6511 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
6512
6513 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
6514 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
6515 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
6516 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
6517
6518 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
6519 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
6520
6521 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
6522 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
6523 different
6524 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
6525 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
6526
6527       </div>
6528       <div class="tags">
6529
6530
6531         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6532
6533
6534       </div>
6535     </div>
6536     <div class="padding"></div>
6537
6538     <div class="entry">
6539       <div class="title">
6540         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
6541       </div>
6542       <div class="date">
6543          3rd July 2015
6544       </div>
6545       <div class="body">
6546         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
6547 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
6548 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
6549 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
6550 flickering.</p>
6551
6552 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
6553 still as
6554 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
6555 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
6556 good help from
6557 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
6558 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
6559 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
6560 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
6561 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
6562 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
6563 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
6564 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
6565 deteriorated since X41.</p>
6566
6567 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
6568 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
6569 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
6570 have suggestions.</p>
6571
6572 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
6573 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
6574 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
6575
6576       </div>
6577       <div class="tags">
6578
6579
6580         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6581
6582
6583       </div>
6584     </div>
6585     <div class="padding"></div>
6586
6587     <div class="entry">
6588       <div class="title">
6589         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
6590       </div>
6591       <div class="date">
6592         22nd November 2014
6593       </div>
6594       <div class="body">
6595         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
6596 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
6597 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
6598 courtesy of
6599 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
6600 Schubert</a> and
6601 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
6602 McVittie</a>.
6603
6604 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
6605 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
6606 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
6607 you upgrade:</p>
6608
6609 <p><blockquote><pre>
6610 Package: systemd-sysv
6611 Pin: release o=Debian
6612 Pin-Priority: -1
6613 </pre></blockquote><p>
6614
6615 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
6616 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
6617 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
6618 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
6619 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
6620
6621 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
6622 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
6623 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
6624 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
6625 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
6626 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
6627
6628 <p><blockquote><pre>
6629 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
6630 </pre></blockquote><p>
6631
6632 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
6633
6634 <p><blockquote><pre>
6635 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
6636 </pre></blockquote><p>
6637
6638 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
6639 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
6640
6641 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
6642 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
6643 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
6644 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
6645 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
6646 Jessie is released.</p>
6647
6648 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
6649 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
6650 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
6651 line.</p>
6652
6653       </div>
6654       <div class="tags">
6655
6656
6657         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6658
6659
6660       </div>
6661     </div>
6662     <div class="padding"></div>
6663
6664     <div class="entry">
6665       <div class="title">
6666         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
6667       </div>
6668       <div class="date">
6669         10th November 2014
6670       </div>
6671       <div class="body">
6672         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
6673 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
6674 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
6675
6676 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
6677 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
6678 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
6679 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
6680 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
6681 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
6682 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
6683 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
6684 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
6685 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
6686 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
6687 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
6688 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
6689 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
6690 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
6691
6692 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
6693 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
6694 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
6695 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
6696 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
6697 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
6698 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
6699 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
6700 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
6701 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
6702 were fairly easy, and
6703 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
6704 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
6705 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
6706 useful approach.</p>
6707
6708 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
6709 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
6710 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
6711 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
6712 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
6713 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
6714 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
6715 this:</p>
6716
6717 <p><blockquote><pre>
6718 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
6719   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
6720 </pre></blockquote></p>
6721
6722 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
6723 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
6724
6725 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
6726 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
6727 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
6728 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
6729 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
6730 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
6731 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
6732 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
6733 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
6734 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
6735 system.</p>
6736
6737 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
6738 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
6739 SMTorP. :)</p>
6740
6741       </div>
6742       <div class="tags">
6743
6744
6745         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6746
6747
6748       </div>
6749     </div>
6750     <div class="padding"></div>
6751
6752     <div class="entry">
6753       <div class="title">
6754         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
6755       </div>
6756       <div class="date">
6757         22nd October 2014
6758       </div>
6759       <div class="body">
6760         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
6761 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
6762 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
6763 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
6764 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
6765 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
6766 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
6767 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
6768 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
6769 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
6770 lists I recently took over:</p>
6771
6772 <p><blockquote><pre>
6773 % time listadmin xiph
6774 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
6775 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
6776
6777 real    0m1.709s
6778 user    0m0.232s
6779 sys     0m0.012s
6780 %
6781 </pre></blockquote></p>
6782
6783 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
6784 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
6785 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
6786 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
6787 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
6788 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
6789 program.</p>
6790
6791 <p>If you install
6792 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
6793 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
6794 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
6795
6796 <p><blockquote><pre>
6797 username username@example.org
6798 spamlevel 23
6799 default discard
6800 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
6801
6802 password secret
6803 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
6804 mailman-list@lists.example.com
6805
6806 password hidden
6807 other-list@otherserver.example.org
6808 </pre></blockquote></p>
6809
6810 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
6811 learn the details.</p>
6812
6813 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
6814 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
6815 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
6816 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
6817
6818 <p><blockquote><pre>
6819 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
6820 </pre></blockquote></p>
6821
6822 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
6823 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
6824 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
6825 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
6826 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
6827 email.</p>
6828
6829 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
6830 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
6831 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
6832 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
6833 software.</p>
6834
6835 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6836 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6837 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6838
6839 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
6840 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
6841 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
6842 sure why.</p>
6843
6844       </div>
6845       <div class="tags">
6846
6847
6848         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
6849
6850
6851       </div>
6852     </div>
6853     <div class="padding"></div>
6854
6855     <div class="entry">
6856       <div class="title">
6857         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
6858       </div>
6859       <div class="date">
6860         17th October 2014
6861       </div>
6862       <div class="body">
6863         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
6864 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
6865 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
6866 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
6867 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
6868 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
6869 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
6870
6871 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
6872 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
6873 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
6874 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
6875 of this story.)</p>
6876
6877 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
6878 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
6879 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
6880 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
6881 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
6882 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
6883 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
6884 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
6885 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
6886 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
6887
6888 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
6889 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
6890 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
6891 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
6892
6893 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
6894 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
6895
6896 <p><blockquote><pre>
6897 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
6898 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
6899 </pre></blockquote></p>
6900
6901 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
6902 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
6903 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
6904 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
6905 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
6906 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
6907 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
6908 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
6909
6910 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
6911 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
6912
6913 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
6914 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
6915 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
6916 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
6917 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
6918
6919 <p><blockquote><pre>
6920 Task: isenkram-packages
6921 Section: hardware
6922 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
6923  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
6924  proposed.
6925 Test-new-install: show show
6926 Relevance: 8
6927 Packages: for-current-hardware
6928
6929 Task: isenkram-firmware
6930 Section: hardware
6931 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
6932  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
6933  packages are proposed.
6934 Test-new-install: mark show
6935 Relevance: 8
6936 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
6937 </pre></blockquote></p>
6938
6939 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
6940 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
6941 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
6942 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
6943 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
6944
6945 <p><blockquote><pre>
6946 #!/bin/sh
6947 #
6948 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
6949 export PATH
6950 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
6951 </pre></blockquote></p>
6952
6953 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
6954 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
6955
6956 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
6957 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
6958 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
6959 install.</p>
6960
6961 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
6962 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
6963 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
6964
6965       </div>
6966       <div class="tags">
6967
6968
6969         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
6970
6971
6972       </div>
6973     </div>
6974     <div class="padding"></div>
6975
6976     <div class="entry">
6977       <div class="title">
6978         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
6979       </div>
6980       <div class="date">
6981          4th October 2014
6982       </div>
6983       <div class="body">
6984         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
6985 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
6986 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
6987 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
6988
6989 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
6990
6991 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
6992 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
6993 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
6994
6995       </div>
6996       <div class="tags">
6997
6998
6999         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7000
7001
7002       </div>
7003     </div>
7004     <div class="padding"></div>
7005
7006     <div class="entry">
7007       <div class="title">
7008         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
7009       </div>
7010       <div class="date">
7011          4th October 2014
7012       </div>
7013       <div class="body">
7014         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
7015 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
7016 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
7017 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
7018 Dibb.</p>
7019
7020 <p>I just wrapped up
7021 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
7022 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
7023 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
7024 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
7025 0.17.</p>
7026
7027 <ul>
7028
7029  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
7030  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
7031    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
7032  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
7033  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
7034  <li>Fix include orders</li>
7035  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
7036  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
7037  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
7038    the palette size is the same.</li>
7039  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
7040  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
7041  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
7042  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
7043    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
7044
7045 </ul>
7046
7047 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
7048 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
7049 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
7050
7051       </div>
7052       <div class="tags">
7053
7054
7055         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7056
7057
7058       </div>
7059     </div>
7060     <div class="padding"></div>
7061
7062     <div class="entry">
7063       <div class="title">
7064         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
7065       </div>
7066       <div class="date">
7067         26th September 2014
7068       </div>
7069       <div class="body">
7070         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7071 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
7072 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
7073 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
7074 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
7075 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
7076 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
7077 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
7078 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
7079 future.  The
7080 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
7081 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
7082 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
7083 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
7084 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
7085
7086 <p>First, download the test ISO via
7087 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
7088 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
7089 or rsync (use
7090 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
7091 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
7092 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
7093 install with some tweaking.</p>
7094
7095 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
7096 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
7097
7098 <p><blockquote><pre>
7099 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
7100 </pre></blockquote></p>
7101
7102 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
7103 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
7104 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
7105 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
7106
7107 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
7108 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
7109 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
7110 your need.</p>
7111
7112 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
7113 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
7114 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
7115 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
7116 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
7117 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
7118 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
7119 days.</p>
7120
7121 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
7122 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
7123 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
7124 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
7125 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
7126 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
7127 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
7128 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
7129 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
7130
7131 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
7132 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
7133 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
7134
7135       </div>
7136       <div class="tags">
7137
7138
7139         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7140
7141
7142       </div>
7143     </div>
7144     <div class="padding"></div>
7145
7146     <div class="entry">
7147       <div class="title">
7148         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
7149       </div>
7150       <div class="date">
7151         25th September 2014
7152       </div>
7153       <div class="body">
7154         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
7155 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
7156 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
7157 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
7158 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
7159 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
7160 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
7161 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
7162 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
7163 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
7164 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
7165 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
7166 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
7167
7168 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
7169 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
7170 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
7171 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
7172 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
7173 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
7174 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
7175 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
7176 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
7177 list</a>. :)</p>
7178
7179       </div>
7180       <div class="tags">
7181
7182
7183         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7184
7185
7186       </div>
7187     </div>
7188     <div class="padding"></div>
7189
7190     <div class="entry">
7191       <div class="title">
7192         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
7193       </div>
7194       <div class="date">
7195         16th September 2014
7196       </div>
7197       <div class="body">
7198         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
7199 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
7200 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
7201 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
7202 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
7203 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
7204 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
7205 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
7206 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
7207 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
7208 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
7209 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
7210 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
7211 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
7212
7213 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
7214 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
7215 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
7216 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
7217 depend on the small and clever package
7218 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
7219 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
7220 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
7221 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
7222 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
7223 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
7224 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
7225 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
7226 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
7227 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
7228 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
7229
7230 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
7231 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
7232 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
7233 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
7234 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
7235 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
7236 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
7237 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
7238 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
7239 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
7240 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
7241 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
7242 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
7243 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
7244 dialog.</p>
7245
7246 <p><table>
7247
7248 <tr>
7249 <th>Machine/setup</th>
7250 <th>Original tasksel</th>
7251 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
7252 <th>Reduction</th>
7253 </tr>
7254
7255 <tr>
7256 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
7257 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
7258 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
7259 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
7260 </tr>
7261
7262 <tr>
7263 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
7264 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
7265 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
7266 <td>23 min 40%</td>
7267 </tr>
7268
7269 <tr>
7270 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
7271 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
7272 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
7273 <td>11 min 50%</td>
7274 </tr>
7275
7276 <tr>
7277 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
7278 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
7279 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
7280 <td>2 min 33%</td>
7281 </tr>
7282
7283 <tr>
7284 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
7285 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
7286 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
7287 <td>4 min 21%</td>
7288 </tr>
7289
7290 </table></p>
7291
7292 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
7293 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
7294 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
7295 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
7296 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
7297 installed.</p>
7298
7299 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
7300 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
7301 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
7302 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
7303 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
7304 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
7305 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
7306 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
7307 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
7308 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
7309 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
7310 for the entire installation.</p>
7311
7312 <p>I've implemented this in the
7313 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
7314 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
7315 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
7316 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
7317 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
7318
7319 <p><blockquote><pre>
7320 #!/bin/sh
7321 set -e
7322 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
7323 info() {
7324     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
7325 }
7326 error() {
7327     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
7328 }
7329 override_install() {
7330     apt-install eatmydata || true
7331     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
7332         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
7333             file=/usr/bin/$bin
7334             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
7335             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
7336                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
7337                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
7338                     > /target$file.edu
7339                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
7340                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
7341                     --rename --quiet --add $file
7342                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
7343             else
7344                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
7345             fi
7346         done
7347     else
7348         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
7349     fi
7350 }
7351
7352 override_install
7353 </pre></blockquote></p>
7354
7355 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
7356 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
7357
7358 <p><blockquote><pre>
7359 #! /bin/sh -e
7360 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
7361 error() {
7362     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
7363 }
7364 remove_install_override() {
7365     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
7366         file=/usr/bin/$bin
7367         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
7368             rm /target$file
7369             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
7370                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
7371             rm /target$file.edu
7372         else
7373             error "Missing divert for $file."
7374         fi
7375     done
7376     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
7377 }
7378
7379 remove_install_override
7380 </pre></blockquote></p>
7381
7382 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
7383 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
7384 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
7385
7386 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
7387 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
7388 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
7389 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
7390 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
7391 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
7392 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
7393 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
7394 everyone.</p>
7395
7396 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
7397 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
7398 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
7399 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
7400
7401 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
7402 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
7403 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
7404 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
7405 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
7406
7407 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
7408 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
7409 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
7410 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
7411 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
7412
7413       </div>
7414       <div class="tags">
7415
7416
7417         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7418
7419
7420       </div>
7421     </div>
7422     <div class="padding"></div>
7423
7424     <div class="entry">
7425       <div class="title">
7426         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
7427       </div>
7428       <div class="date">
7429         10th September 2014
7430       </div>
7431       <div class="body">
7432         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
7433 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
7434 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
7435 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
7436 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
7437 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
7438 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
7439 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
7440 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
7441 those problems are gone now.</p>
7442
7443 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
7444 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
7445 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
7446 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
7447 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
7448
7449 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
7450 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
7451 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
7452
7453 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
7454 line:</p>
7455
7456 <p><blockquote><pre>
7457 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
7458 </pre></blockquote></p>
7459
7460 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
7461 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
7462 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
7463 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
7464
7465 <p><blockquote><pre>
7466 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
7467 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
7468 %
7469 </pre></blockquote></p>
7470
7471 <p>Now if only
7472 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
7473 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
7474 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
7475 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
7476 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
7477 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
7478 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
7479 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
7480 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
7481
7482       </div>
7483       <div class="tags">
7484
7485
7486         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7487
7488
7489       </div>
7490     </div>
7491     <div class="padding"></div>
7492
7493     <div class="entry">
7494       <div class="title">
7495         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
7496       </div>
7497       <div class="date">
7498         17th June 2014
7499       </div>
7500       <div class="body">
7501         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7502 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
7503 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
7504 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
7505 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
7506
7507 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
7508 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
7509 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
7510 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
7511 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
7512 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
7513 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
7514 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
7515 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
7516 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
7517 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
7518 goals.</p>
7519
7520 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
7521 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
7522 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
7523 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
7524 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
7525 chapters together into one large web page (aka
7526 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
7527 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
7528 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
7529 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
7530 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
7531 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
7532 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
7533 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
7534 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
7535 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
7536 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
7537 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
7538 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
7539 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
7540 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
7541 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
7542 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
7543 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
7544
7545 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
7546 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
7547 track the English original.  For this we use the
7548 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
7549 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
7550 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
7551 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
7552 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
7553 files), which the translations update with the native language
7554 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
7555 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
7556 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
7557 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
7558 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
7559 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
7560 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
7561 of the documentation.</p>
7562
7563 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
7564 recommend using
7565 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
7566 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
7567 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
7568 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
7569 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
7570 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
7571 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
7572 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
7573
7574 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
7575 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
7576 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
7577 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
7578 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
7579 translated images by storing translated versions in
7580 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
7581 package maintainers know more.</p>
7582
7583 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
7584 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
7585 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
7586 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
7587 PDF version</a> or the
7588 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
7589 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
7590 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
7591
7592 <p>To learn more, check out
7593 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
7594 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
7595 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
7596 manual on the wiki</a> and
7597 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
7598 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
7599
7600       </div>
7601       <div class="tags">
7602
7603
7604         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7605
7606
7607       </div>
7608     </div>
7609     <div class="padding"></div>
7610
7611     <div class="entry">
7612       <div class="title">
7613         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
7614       </div>
7615       <div class="date">
7616         23rd April 2014
7617       </div>
7618       <div class="body">
7619         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
7620 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
7621 So I implemented one, using
7622 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
7623 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
7624 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
7625 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
7626 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
7627 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
7628
7629 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
7630 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
7631 packages to install.  The first part is in
7632 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
7633 this:</p>
7634
7635 <p><blockquote><pre>
7636 Task: isenkram
7637 Section: hardware
7638 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7639  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
7640  proposed.
7641 Test-new-install: mark show
7642 Relevance: 8
7643 Packages: for-current-hardware
7644 </pre></blockquote></p>
7645
7646 <p>The second part is in
7647 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
7648 this:</p>
7649
7650 <p><blockquote><pre>
7651 #!/bin/sh
7652 #
7653 (
7654     isenkram-lookup
7655     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
7656 ) | sort -u
7657 </pre></blockquote></p>
7658
7659 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
7660 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
7661 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
7662 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
7663 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
7664 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
7665
7666 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
7667 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
7668 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
7669 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
7670 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
7671 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
7672 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
7673 the python-apt code (bug
7674 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
7675 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
7676 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
7677 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
7678 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
7679 unstable today.</p>
7680
7681 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
7682 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
7683 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
7684 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
7685 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
7686 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
7687 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
7688 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
7689 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
7690
7691 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
7692 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
7693 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
7694 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
7695 package.  See also
7696 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
7697 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
7698 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
7699 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
7700
7701       </div>
7702       <div class="tags">
7703
7704
7705         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7706
7707
7708       </div>
7709     </div>
7710     <div class="padding"></div>
7711
7712     <div class="entry">
7713       <div class="title">
7714         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
7715       </div>
7716       <div class="date">
7717         15th April 2014
7718       </div>
7719       <div class="body">
7720         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
7721 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
7722 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
7723 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
7724 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
7725 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
7726
7727 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
7728 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
7729 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
7730 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
7731 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
7732 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
7733 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
7734
7735 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
7736 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
7737 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
7738 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
7739 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
7740 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
7741 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
7742 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
7743 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
7744 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
7745 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
7746 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
7747
7748 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
7749 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
7750 become root:</p>
7751
7752 <p><pre>
7753 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
7754   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
7755   u-boot-tools
7756 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
7757   freedom-maker
7758 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
7759 </pre></p>
7760
7761 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
7762 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
7763 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
7764 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
7765 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
7766 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
7767 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
7768 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
7769
7770 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
7771 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
7772 the preseed values:</p>
7773
7774 <p><pre>
7775 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
7776 </pre></p>
7777
7778 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
7779 it still work.</p>
7780
7781 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
7782 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
7783 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
7784 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
7785 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
7786 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
7787 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
7788
7789 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
7790 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
7791 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
7792 irc.debian.org)</a> and
7793 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
7794 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
7795
7796       </div>
7797       <div class="tags">
7798
7799
7800         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
7801
7802
7803       </div>
7804     </div>
7805     <div class="padding"></div>
7806
7807     <div class="entry">
7808       <div class="title">
7809         <a href="https://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>
7810       </div>
7811       <div class="date">
7812          9th April 2014
7813       </div>
7814       <div class="body">
7815         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
7816 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
7817 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
7818 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
7819 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
7820 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
7821 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
7822 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
7823 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
7824 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
7825 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
7826 have looked at a system called
7827 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
7828 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
7829
7830 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
7831 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
7832 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
7833 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
7834 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
7835 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
7836 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
7837 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
7838 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
7839 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
7840 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
7841 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
7842 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
7843
7844 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
7845 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
7846 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
7847 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
7848 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
7849 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
7850 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
7851 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
7852 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
7853 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
7854 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
7855 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
7856 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
7857 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
7858 account.</p>
7859
7860 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
7861 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
7862 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
7863 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
7864 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
7865 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
7866 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
7867
7868 <p><blockquote><pre>
7869 [s3c]
7870 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
7871 backend-login: API-login
7872 backend-password: API-password
7873 fs-passphrase: local-password
7874 </pre></blockquote></p>
7875
7876 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
7877 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
7878 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
7879 details and password to create it:</p>
7880
7881 <p><blockquote><pre>
7882 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
7883 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
7884   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
7885 Enter backend login:
7886 Enter backend password:
7887 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
7888 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
7889 Enter encryption password:
7890 Confirm encryption password:
7891 Generating random encryption key...
7892 Creating metadata tables...
7893 Dumping metadata...
7894 ..objects..
7895 ..blocks..
7896 ..inodes..
7897 ..inode_blocks..
7898 ..symlink_targets..
7899 ..names..
7900 ..contents..
7901 ..ext_attributes..
7902 Compressing and uploading metadata...
7903 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
7904 # </pre></blockquote></p>
7905
7906 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
7907
7908 <p><blockquote><pre>
7909 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
7910   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
7911 Using 4 upload threads.
7912 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
7913 Reading metadata...
7914 ..objects..
7915 ..blocks..
7916 ..inodes..
7917 ..inode_blocks..
7918 ..symlink_targets..
7919 ..names..
7920 ..contents..
7921 ..ext_attributes..
7922 Mounting filesystem...
7923 # df -h /s3ql
7924 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
7925 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
7926 #
7927 </pre></blockquote></p>
7928
7929 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
7930 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
7931 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
7932 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
7933 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
7934 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
7935
7936 <p><blockquote><pre>
7937 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
7938 #
7939 </pre></blockquote></p>
7940
7941 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
7942 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
7943 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
7944 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
7945 file system:</p>
7946
7947 <p><blockquote><pre>
7948 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
7949 Using cached metadata.
7950 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
7951 Checking DB integrity...
7952 Creating temporary extra indices...
7953 Checking lost+found...
7954 Checking cached objects...
7955 Checking names (refcounts)...
7956 Checking contents (names)...
7957 Checking contents (inodes)...
7958 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
7959 Checking objects (reference counts)...
7960 Checking objects (backend)...
7961 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
7962 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
7963 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
7964 Checking objects (sizes)...
7965 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
7966 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
7967 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
7968 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
7969 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
7970 Checking inodes (sizes)...
7971 Checking extended attributes (names)...
7972 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
7973 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
7974 Checking directory reachability...
7975 Checking unix conventions...
7976 Checking referential integrity...
7977 Dropping temporary indices...
7978 Backing up old metadata...
7979 Dumping metadata...
7980 ..objects..
7981 ..blocks..
7982 ..inodes..
7983 ..inode_blocks..
7984 ..symlink_targets..
7985 ..names..
7986 ..contents..
7987 ..ext_attributes..
7988 Compressing and uploading metadata...
7989 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
7990 #
7991 </pre></blockquote></p>
7992
7993 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
7994 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
7995 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
7996 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
7997 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
7998 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
7999 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
8000 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
8001 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
8002 working set.</p>
8003
8004 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
8005 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
8006 busy:</p>
8007
8008 <p><blockquote><pre>
8009 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8010   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
8011 Using 8 upload threads.
8012 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
8013 #
8014 </pre></blockquote></p>
8015
8016 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
8017 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
8018 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
8019 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
8020 s3qlctrl:
8021
8022 <p><blockquote><pre>
8023 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
8024 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
8025 #
8026 </pre></blockquote></p>
8027
8028 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
8029 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
8030 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
8031 a report:</p>
8032
8033 <p><blockquote><pre>
8034 # s3qlstat /s3ql
8035 Directory entries:    9141
8036 Inodes:               9143
8037 Data blocks:          8851
8038 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
8039 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
8040 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
8041 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
8042 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
8043 #
8044 </pre></blockquote></p>
8045
8046 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
8047 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
8048 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
8049 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
8050 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
8051 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
8052 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
8053 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
8054 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
8055 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
8056 best.</p>
8057
8058 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
8059 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
8060 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
8061 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
8062 poster is titled
8063 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
8064 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
8065 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
8066 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
8067 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
8068
8069 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
8070 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
8071 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
8072 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
8073 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
8074 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
8075 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
8076 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
8077
8078 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
8079 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
8080 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
8081 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
8082 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
8083 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
8084 only read from it.</p>
8085
8086 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8087 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8088 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8089
8090       </div>
8091       <div class="tags">
8092
8093
8094         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
8095
8096
8097       </div>
8098     </div>
8099     <div class="padding"></div>
8100
8101     <div class="entry">
8102       <div class="title">
8103         <a href="https://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>
8104       </div>
8105       <div class="date">
8106         14th March 2014
8107       </div>
8108       <div class="body">
8109         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
8110 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
8111 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
8112 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
8113 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
8114 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
8115 release (0.2).</p>
8116
8117 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
8118 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
8119 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
8120 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
8121 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
8122 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
8123 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
8124 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
8125 and build using
8126 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
8127 with a user with sudo access to become root:
8128
8129 <pre>
8130 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
8131   freedom-maker
8132 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
8133   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
8134   u-boot-tools
8135 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
8136 </pre>
8137
8138 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
8139 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
8140 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
8141 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
8142 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
8143 kpartx call.</p>
8144
8145 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
8146 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
8147 the preseed values:</p>
8148
8149 <pre>
8150 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
8151 </pre>
8152
8153 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
8154 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
8155 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
8156 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
8157 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
8158 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
8159
8160 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
8161 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
8162 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
8163 irc.debian.org)</a> and
8164 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
8165 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
8166
8167       </div>
8168       <div class="tags">
8169
8170
8171         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8172
8173
8174       </div>
8175     </div>
8176     <div class="padding"></div>
8177
8178     <div class="entry">
8179       <div class="title">
8180         <a href="https://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>
8181       </div>
8182       <div class="date">
8183         22nd February 2014
8184       </div>
8185       <div class="body">
8186         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
8187 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
8188 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
8189 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
8190 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
8191 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
8192 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
8193 proper home since then.</p>
8194
8195 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
8196 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
8197 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
8198 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
8199 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
8200
8201 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
8202 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
8203 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
8204 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
8205 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
8206 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
8207 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
8208 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
8209 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
8210
8211       </div>
8212       <div class="tags">
8213
8214
8215         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8216
8217
8218       </div>
8219     </div>
8220     <div class="padding"></div>
8221
8222     <div class="entry">
8223       <div class="title">
8224         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
8225       </div>
8226       <div class="date">
8227          3rd February 2014
8228       </div>
8229       <div class="body">
8230         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
8231 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
8232 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
8233 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
8234 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
8235 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
8236 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
8237 <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>,
8238 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
8239
8240 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
8241 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
8242 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
8243 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
8244 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
8245 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
8246
8247 <p><blockquote><pre>
8248 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
8249 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
8250 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
8251 dhclient /dev/eth0
8252 </pre></blockquote></p>
8253
8254 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
8255 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
8256 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
8257
8258 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
8259 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
8260 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
8261 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
8262 side.</p>
8263
8264 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
8265 stuff:</p>
8266
8267 <p><blockquote><pre>
8268 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
8269 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
8270 EOF
8271 apt-get update
8272 apt-get dist-upgrade
8273 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
8274     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
8275 update-alternatives --config runsystem
8276 </pre></blockquote></p>
8277
8278 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
8279 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
8280 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
8281 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
8282 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
8283 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
8284 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
8285 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
8286 ssh instead.
8287
8288 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
8289 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
8290 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
8291 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
8292 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
8293 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
8294
8295 <p><blockquote><pre>
8296 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
8297 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
8298 EOF
8299 </pre></blockquote></p>
8300
8301 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
8302 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
8303 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
8304 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
8305
8306 <p><blockquote><pre>
8307 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
8308 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
8309 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
8310 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
8311 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
8312 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
8313 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
8314 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
8315 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
8316 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
8317 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
8318 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
8319 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
8320 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
8321 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
8322 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
8323 #
8324 </pre></blockquote></p>
8325
8326 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
8327 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
8328 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
8329 command line stuff.<p>
8330
8331       </div>
8332       <div class="tags">
8333
8334
8335         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8336
8337
8338       </div>
8339     </div>
8340     <div class="padding"></div>
8341
8342     <div class="entry">
8343       <div class="title">
8344         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
8345       </div>
8346       <div class="date">
8347         14th January 2014
8348       </div>
8349       <div class="body">
8350         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
8351 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
8352 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
8353 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
8354 the source.  The company behind it provide
8355 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
8356 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
8357 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
8358 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
8359 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
8360 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
8361 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
8362 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
8363 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
8364 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
8365 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
8366 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
8367 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
8368 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
8369 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
8370 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
8371 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
8372 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
8373 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
8374
8375 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
8376
8377 <ul>
8378
8379   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
8380   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
8381   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
8382
8383 </ul>
8384
8385 <p>You can
8386 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
8387 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
8388 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
8389 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
8390 include a test suite check.</p>
8391
8392       </div>
8393       <div class="tags">
8394
8395
8396         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8397
8398
8399       </div>
8400     </div>
8401     <div class="padding"></div>
8402
8403     <div class="entry">
8404       <div class="title">
8405         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
8406       </div>
8407       <div class="date">
8408         24th November 2013
8409       </div>
8410       <div class="body">
8411         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
8412 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
8413 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
8414 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
8415 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
8416 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
8417 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
8418 is working on.  I checked the
8419 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
8420 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
8421 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
8422 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
8423 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
8424 These are the release notes:</p>
8425
8426 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
8427
8428 <ul>
8429
8430   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
8431    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
8432    up.</li>
8433
8434   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
8435
8436   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
8437    Matthias Klose.</li>
8438
8439   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
8440    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
8441
8442   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
8443    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
8444    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
8445
8446 </ul>
8447
8448 <p>You can
8449 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
8450 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
8451 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
8452 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
8453 include a testsuite check.</p>
8454
8455       </div>
8456       <div class="tags">
8457
8458
8459         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8460
8461
8462       </div>
8463     </div>
8464     <div class="padding"></div>
8465
8466     <div class="entry">
8467       <div class="title">
8468         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
8469       </div>
8470       <div class="date">
8471          2nd November 2013
8472       </div>
8473       <div class="body">
8474         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
8475 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
8476 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
8477 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
8478 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
8479
8480 <p><pre>
8481 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
8482 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
8483 # Provides:          rsyslog
8484 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
8485 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
8486 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
8487 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
8488 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
8489 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
8490 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
8491 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
8492 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
8493 ### END INIT INFO
8494 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
8495 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
8496 </pre></p>
8497
8498 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
8499 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
8500 info/comments.</p>
8501
8502 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
8503 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
8504
8505 <p><pre>
8506 #!/bin/sh
8507
8508 # Define LSB log_* functions.
8509 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
8510 # and status_of_proc is working.
8511 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
8512
8513 #
8514 # Function that starts the daemon/service
8515
8516 #
8517 do_start()
8518 {
8519         # Return
8520         #   0 if daemon has been started
8521         #   1 if daemon was already running
8522         #   2 if daemon could not be started
8523         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
8524                 || return 1
8525         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
8526                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
8527                 || return 2
8528         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
8529         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
8530         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
8531 }
8532
8533 #
8534 # Function that stops the daemon/service
8535 #
8536 do_stop()
8537 {
8538         # Return
8539         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
8540         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
8541         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
8542         #   other if a failure occurred
8543         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
8544         RETVAL="$?"
8545         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
8546         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
8547         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
8548         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
8549         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
8550         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
8551         # sleep for some time.
8552         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
8553         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
8554         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
8555         rm -f $PIDFILE
8556         return "$RETVAL"
8557 }
8558
8559 #
8560 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
8561 #
8562 do_reload() {
8563         #
8564         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
8565         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
8566         # then implement that here.
8567         #
8568         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
8569         return 0
8570 }
8571
8572 SCRIPTNAME=$1
8573 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
8574 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
8575 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
8576     script="$1"
8577     shift
8578     . $script
8579 else
8580     exit 0
8581 fi
8582
8583 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
8584 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
8585
8586 # Exit if the package is not installed
8587 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
8588
8589 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
8590 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
8591
8592 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
8593 . /lib/init/vars.sh
8594
8595 case "$1" in
8596   start)
8597         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
8598         do_start
8599         case "$?" in
8600                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
8601                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
8602         esac
8603         ;;
8604   stop)
8605         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
8606         do_stop
8607         case "$?" in
8608                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
8609                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
8610         esac
8611         ;;
8612   status)
8613         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
8614         ;;
8615   #reload|force-reload)
8616         #
8617         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
8618         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
8619         #
8620         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
8621         #do_reload
8622         #log_end_msg $?
8623         #;;
8624   restart|force-reload)
8625         #
8626         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
8627         # 'force-reload' alias
8628         #
8629         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
8630         do_stop
8631         case "$?" in
8632           0|1)
8633                 do_start
8634                 case "$?" in
8635                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
8636                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
8637                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
8638                 esac
8639                 ;;
8640           *)
8641                 # Failed to stop
8642                 log_end_msg 1
8643                 ;;
8644         esac
8645         ;;
8646   *)
8647         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
8648         exit 3
8649         ;;
8650 esac
8651
8652 :
8653 </pre></p>
8654
8655 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
8656 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
8657 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
8658 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
8659
8660 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
8661 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
8662 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
8663 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
8664 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
8665
8666       </div>
8667       <div class="tags">
8668
8669
8670         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8671
8672
8673       </div>
8674     </div>
8675     <div class="padding"></div>
8676
8677     <div class="entry">
8678       <div class="title">
8679         <a href="https://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>
8680       </div>
8681       <div class="date">
8682          1st November 2013
8683       </div>
8684       <div class="body">
8685         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
8686 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
8687 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
8688 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
8689 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
8690 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
8691 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
8692 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
8693 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
8694 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
8695 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
8696 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
8697
8698 <p>The source is now available from
8699 <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>
8700
8701       </div>
8702       <div class="tags">
8703
8704
8705         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8706
8707
8708       </div>
8709     </div>
8710     <div class="padding"></div>
8711
8712     <div class="entry">
8713       <div class="title">
8714         <a href="https://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>
8715       </div>
8716       <div class="date">
8717         27th October 2013
8718       </div>
8719       <div class="body">
8720         <p>The
8721 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
8722 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
8723 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
8724 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
8725 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
8726 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
8727 of a plan to simplify the build system for
8728 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
8729 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
8730 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
8731 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
8732 Raspberry Pi.</p>
8733
8734 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
8735 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
8736 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
8737 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
8738 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
8739 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
8740 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
8741 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
8742 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
8743 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
8744 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
8745 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
8746 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
8747 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
8748 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
8749 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
8750 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
8751 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
8752 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
8753 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
8754 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
8755 available from
8756 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
8757 upstream project page</a>.</p>
8758
8759 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
8760 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
8761 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
8762 list:</p>
8763
8764 <p><pre>
8765 #!/bin/sh
8766 set -e # Exit on first error
8767 rootdir="$1"
8768 cd "$rootdir"
8769 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
8770 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
8771 EOF
8772 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
8773 # install a kernel somewhere too.
8774 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
8775     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8776 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8777 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
8778 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
8779 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
8780 </pre></p>
8781
8782 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
8783 to build the image:</p>
8784
8785 <pre>
8786 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
8787     --variant minbase \
8788     --arch armel \
8789     --distribution jessie \
8790     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
8791     --image test.img \
8792     --size 600M \
8793     --bootsize 64M \
8794     --boottype vfat \
8795     --log-level debug \
8796     --verbose \
8797     --no-kernel \
8798     --no-extlinux \
8799     --root-password raspberry \
8800     --hostname raspberrypi \
8801     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
8802     --customize `pwd`/customize \
8803     --package netbase \
8804     --package git-core \
8805     --package binutils \
8806     --package ca-certificates \
8807     --package wget \
8808     --package kmod
8809 </pre></p>
8810
8811 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
8812 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
8813 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
8814 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
8815 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
8816 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
8817 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
8818
8819 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
8820 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
8821 build dependency list.</p>
8822
8823 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
8824 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
8825 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
8826 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
8827
8828       </div>
8829       <div class="tags">
8830
8831
8832         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
8833
8834
8835       </div>
8836     </div>
8837     <div class="padding"></div>
8838
8839     <div class="entry">
8840       <div class="title">
8841         <a href="https://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>
8842       </div>
8843       <div class="date">
8844         15th October 2013
8845       </div>
8846       <div class="body">
8847         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
8848 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
8849 these. :)</p>
8850
8851 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
8852 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
8853 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
8854 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
8855 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
8856 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
8857 hope you will to. :)</p>
8858
8859 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
8860 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
8861 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
8862 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
8863 donated.  Are you next?</p>
8864
8865 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
8866 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
8867 statement under the heading
8868 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
8869 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
8870 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
8871 too.</p>
8872
8873       </div>
8874       <div class="tags">
8875
8876
8877         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
8878
8879
8880       </div>
8881     </div>
8882     <div class="padding"></div>
8883
8884     <div class="entry">
8885       <div class="title">
8886         <a href="https://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>
8887       </div>
8888       <div class="date">
8889         27th September 2013
8890       </div>
8891       <div class="body">
8892         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
8893 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
8894 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
8895 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
8896
8897 <ul>
8898
8899 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
8900 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
8901
8902 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
8903 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
8904
8905 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
8906 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
8907 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
8908 (Youtube)</li>
8909
8910 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
8911 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
8912
8913 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
8914 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
8915
8916 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
8917 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
8918 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
8919
8920 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
8921 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
8922 (Youtube)</li>
8923
8924 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
8925 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
8926
8927 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
8928 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
8929
8930 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
8931 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
8932 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
8933
8934 </ul>
8935
8936 <p>A larger list is available from
8937 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
8938 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
8939
8940 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
8941 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
8942 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
8943 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
8944 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
8945 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
8946 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
8947 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
8948 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
8949 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
8950 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
8951
8952       </div>
8953       <div class="tags">
8954
8955
8956         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8957
8958
8959       </div>
8960     </div>
8961     <div class="padding"></div>
8962
8963     <div class="entry">
8964       <div class="title">
8965         <a href="https://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>
8966       </div>
8967       <div class="date">
8968         10th September 2013
8969       </div>
8970       <div class="body">
8971         <p>I was introduced to the
8972 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
8973 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
8974 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
8975 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
8976 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
8977 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
8978 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
8979 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
8980
8981 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
8982 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
8983 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
8984 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
8985 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
8986
8987 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
8988 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
8989 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
8990 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
8991 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
8992 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
8993 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
8994 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
8995 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
8996 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
8997 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
8998 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
8999 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
9000 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
9001 missing in Debian).</p>
9002
9003 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
9004 scripts
9005 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
9006 and a administrative web interface
9007 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
9008 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
9009 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
9010 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
9011 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
9012 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
9013 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
9014 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
9015 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
9016 this is really working yet, see
9017 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
9018 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
9019 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
9020 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
9021 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
9022 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
9023 with lots of half baked features.</p>
9024
9025 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
9026 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
9027 at.</p>
9028
9029 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
9030
9031 <ol>
9032
9033 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
9034 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
9035 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
9036 to the Debian installer:<p>
9037 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
9038
9039 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
9040 install on.</li>
9041
9042 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
9043 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
9044
9045 </ol>
9046
9047 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
9048
9049 <ol>
9050
9051 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
9052 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
9053 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
9054 <pre>
9055 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
9056 </pre></li>
9057 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
9058 <pre>
9059 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
9060    apt-key add -
9061 apt-get update
9062 apt-get install freedombox-setup
9063 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
9064 </pre></li>
9065 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
9066
9067 </ol>
9068
9069 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
9070 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
9071 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
9072 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
9073 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
9074
9075 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
9076 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
9077 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
9078 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
9079
9080 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
9081 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
9082 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
9083 irc.debian.org and the
9084 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
9085 mailing list</a>.</p>
9086
9087 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
9088 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
9089 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
9090 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
9091 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
9092 default password is 'secret'.</p>
9093
9094       </div>
9095       <div class="tags">
9096
9097
9098         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9099
9100
9101       </div>
9102     </div>
9103     <div class="padding"></div>
9104
9105     <div class="entry">
9106       <div class="title">
9107         <a href="https://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>
9108       </div>
9109       <div class="date">
9110         18th August 2013
9111       </div>
9112       <div class="body">
9113         <p>Earlier, I reported about
9114 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
9115 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
9116 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
9117 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
9118 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
9119 currently on the disk.</p>
9120
9121 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
9122 <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>
9123 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
9124 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
9125 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
9126 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
9127 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
9128 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
9129 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
9130 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
9131 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
9132 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
9133 the broken disks.</p>
9134
9135       </div>
9136       <div class="tags">
9137
9138
9139         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9140
9141
9142       </div>
9143     </div>
9144     <div class="padding"></div>
9145
9146     <div class="entry">
9147       <div class="title">
9148         <a href="https://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>
9149       </div>
9150       <div class="date">
9151         17th July 2013
9152       </div>
9153       <div class="body">
9154         <p>Today I switched to
9155 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
9156 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
9157 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
9158 <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
9159 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
9160 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
9161 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
9162 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
9163 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
9164 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
9165 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
9166 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
9167 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
9168 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
9169 station from now on.</p>
9170
9171 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
9172 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
9173 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
9174 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
9175 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
9176 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
9177 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
9178 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
9179 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
9180 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
9181 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
9182 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
9183
9184 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
9185 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
9186 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
9187 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
9188 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
9189 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
9190 parameters are tuned:</p>
9191
9192 <ul>
9193
9194 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
9195     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
9196
9197 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
9198     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
9199     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
9200
9201 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
9202     systems.</li>
9203
9204 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
9205     /etc/fstab.</li>
9206
9207 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
9208
9209 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
9210     cron.daily).</li>
9211
9212 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
9213     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
9214
9215 </ul>
9216
9217 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
9218 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
9219 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
9220 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
9221 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
9222 from getting the data on the disk (see
9223 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
9224 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
9225 right thing to do.</p>
9226
9227 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
9228 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
9229 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
9230
9231 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
9232 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
9233 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
9234 instead of during my work.</p>
9235
9236 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
9237 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
9238
9239 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
9240 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
9241 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
9242
9243 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
9244 there.</p>
9245
9246 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
9247 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
9248 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
9249 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
9250 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
9251 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
9252 back.</p>
9253
9254       </div>
9255       <div class="tags">
9256
9257
9258         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9259
9260
9261       </div>
9262     </div>
9263     <div class="padding"></div>
9264
9265     <div class="entry">
9266       <div class="title">
9267         <a href="https://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>
9268       </div>
9269       <div class="date">
9270         10th July 2013
9271       </div>
9272       <div class="body">
9273         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
9274 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
9275 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
9276 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
9277 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
9278 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
9279 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
9280 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
9281
9282 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
9283 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
9284 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
9285 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
9286 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
9287 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
9288 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
9289 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
9290 lock up when I download a new
9291 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
9292 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
9293 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
9294
9295 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
9296 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
9297 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
9298 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
9299 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
9300 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
9301
9302 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
9303 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
9304 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
9305 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
9306 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
9307 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
9308
9309 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
9310 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
9311 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
9312 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
9313 exist).</p>
9314
9315       </div>
9316       <div class="tags">
9317
9318
9319         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9320
9321
9322       </div>
9323     </div>
9324     <div class="padding"></div>
9325
9326     <div class="entry">
9327       <div class="title">
9328         <a href="https://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>
9329       </div>
9330       <div class="date">
9331          9th July 2013
9332       </div>
9333       <div class="body">
9334         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
9335 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
9336 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
9337 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
9338 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9339 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
9340 Bitraf</a>.</p>
9341
9342 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
9343 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
9344 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
9345 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
9346 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
9347
9348       </div>
9349       <div class="tags">
9350
9351
9352         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9353
9354
9355       </div>
9356     </div>
9357     <div class="padding"></div>
9358
9359     <div class="entry">
9360       <div class="title">
9361         <a href="https://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>
9362       </div>
9363       <div class="date">
9364          5th July 2013
9365       </div>
9366       <div class="body">
9367         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
9368 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
9369 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
9370 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
9371 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
9372 ended up picking a
9373 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
9374 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
9375 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
9376 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
9377 on that below.</p>
9378
9379 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
9380 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
9381 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
9382 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
9383 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
9384 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
9385 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
9386 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
9387 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
9388
9389 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
9390 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
9391 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
9392 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
9393 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
9394 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
9395 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
9396
9397 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
9398 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
9399
9400 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
9401 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
9402 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
9403 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
9404 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
9405 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
9406 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
9407 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
9408 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
9409 kernel developers as
9410 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
9411 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
9412 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
9413 Lenovo forums, both for
9414 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
9415 2012-11-10</a> and for
9416 <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
9417 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
9418 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
9419 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
9420 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
9421 There is even a
9422 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
9423 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
9424 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
9425
9426 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
9427 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
9428 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
9429 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
9430 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
9431 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
9432 fixed. :)</p>
9433
9434       </div>
9435       <div class="tags">
9436
9437
9438         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9439
9440
9441       </div>
9442     </div>
9443     <div class="padding"></div>
9444
9445     <div class="entry">
9446       <div class="title">
9447         <a href="https://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>
9448       </div>
9449       <div class="date">
9450          4th July 2013
9451       </div>
9452       <div class="body">
9453         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
9454 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
9455 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
9456 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
9457 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
9458 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
9459 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
9460 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
9461 with an expencive door stop.</p>
9462
9463 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
9464 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
9465 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
9466 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
9467 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
9468 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
9469 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
9470
9471 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
9472 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
9473 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
9474 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
9475 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
9476 new laptop now. :)</p>
9477
9478 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
9479
9480       </div>
9481       <div class="tags">
9482
9483
9484         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9485
9486
9487       </div>
9488     </div>
9489     <div class="padding"></div>
9490
9491     <div class="entry">
9492       <div class="title">
9493         <a href="https://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>
9494       </div>
9495       <div class="date">
9496         25th June 2013
9497       </div>
9498       <div class="body">
9499         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
9500 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
9501 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
9502 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
9503 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
9504 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
9505 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
9506 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
9507 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
9508 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
9509 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
9510
9511 <p><pre>
9512 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
9513 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
9514 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
9515 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
9516 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
9517 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
9518 firmware-ipw2x00
9519 firmware-ipw2x00
9520 Preconfiguring packages ...
9521 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
9522 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
9523 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
9524 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
9525 #
9526 </pre></p>
9527
9528 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
9529 printed instead:</p>
9530
9531 <p><pre>
9532 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
9533 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
9534 #
9535 </pre></p>
9536
9537 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
9538 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
9539
9540 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
9541 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
9542 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
9543 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
9544 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
9545 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
9546 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
9547 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
9548 machine.</p>
9549
9550 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
9551 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
9552 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
9553 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
9554 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
9555 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
9556
9557       </div>
9558       <div class="tags">
9559
9560
9561         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
9562
9563
9564       </div>
9565     </div>
9566     <div class="padding"></div>
9567
9568     <div class="entry">
9569       <div class="title">
9570         <a href="https://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>
9571       </div>
9572       <div class="date">
9573         11th June 2013
9574       </div>
9575       <div class="body">
9576         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
9577 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
9578 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
9579 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
9580 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
9581 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
9582 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
9583 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
9584 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
9585 i915 driver used by the
9586 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
9587 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
9588
9589 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
9590 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
9591 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
9592 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
9593 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
9594
9595 <pre>
9596 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
9597 update-initramfs -u -k all
9598 </pre>
9599
9600 <p>Since March 2012 there is
9601 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
9602 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
9603 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
9604 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
9605 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
9606 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
9607 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
9608 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
9609 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
9610 number.</p>
9611
9612 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
9613 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
9614
9615 <p><pre>
9616 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
9617     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
9618     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
9619  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
9620  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
9621     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
9622  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
9623     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
9624  Latency: 0
9625  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
9626  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
9627  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
9628  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
9629  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
9630  Capabilities: <access denied>
9631  Kernel driver in use: i915
9632 </pre></p>
9633
9634 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
9635
9636 <p><pre>
9637 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
9638        ...
9639         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
9640         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
9641        ...
9642 }
9643 </pre></p>
9644
9645 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
9646 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
9647 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
9648 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
9649 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
9650 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
9651 yet shown up in
9652 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
9653 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
9654 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
9655 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
9656 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
9657 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
9658
9659 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
9660 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
9661 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
9662 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
9663 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
9664 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
9665 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
9666 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
9667 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
9668 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
9669 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
9670 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
9671
9672 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
9673 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
9674 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
9675 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
9676 backlight.</p>
9677
9678       </div>
9679       <div class="tags">
9680
9681
9682         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9683
9684
9685       </div>
9686     </div>
9687     <div class="padding"></div>
9688
9689     <div class="entry">
9690       <div class="title">
9691         <a href="https://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>
9692       </div>
9693       <div class="date">
9694         27th May 2013
9695       </div>
9696       <div class="body">
9697         <p>Two days ago, I asked
9698 <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
9699 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
9700 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
9701 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
9702 and Windows 8.</p>
9703
9704 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
9705 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
9706 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
9707 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
9708 enough to tell.</p>
9709
9710 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
9711 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
9712 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
9713 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
9714 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
9715 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
9716 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
9717 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
9718 to follow.</p>
9719
9720 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
9721 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
9722 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
9723 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
9724 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
9725 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
9726 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
9727 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
9728
9729 <p>I've updated the
9730 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
9731 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
9732 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
9733 machine.</p>
9734
9735 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
9736 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
9737
9738       </div>
9739       <div class="tags">
9740
9741
9742         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9743
9744
9745       </div>
9746     </div>
9747     <div class="padding"></div>
9748
9749     <div class="entry">
9750       <div class="title">
9751         <a href="https://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>
9752       </div>
9753       <div class="date">
9754         25th May 2013
9755       </div>
9756       <div class="body">
9757         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
9758 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
9759 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
9760 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
9761 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
9762 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
9763
9764 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
9765 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
9766 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
9767 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
9768 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
9769 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
9770 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
9771 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
9772 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
9773 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
9774
9775 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
9776 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
9777 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
9778 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
9779 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
9780 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
9781
9782 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
9783 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
9784 on new Laptops?</p>
9785
9786       </div>
9787       <div class="tags">
9788
9789
9790         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9791
9792
9793       </div>
9794     </div>
9795     <div class="padding"></div>
9796
9797     <div class="entry">
9798       <div class="title">
9799         <a href="https://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>
9800       </div>
9801       <div class="date">
9802         17th May 2013
9803       </div>
9804       <div class="body">
9805         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
9806 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
9807 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
9808 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
9809 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
9810 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
9811 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
9812 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
9813 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
9814 donate some money</a>.
9815
9816 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
9817 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
9818 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
9819 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
9820 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
9821
9822 <p>The script,
9823 <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/>
9824 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
9825 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
9826 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
9827
9828 <ol>
9829
9830 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
9831 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
9832 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
9833     our configuration.</li>
9834 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
9835     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
9836     according to the profile specified in the config above,
9837     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
9838 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
9839     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
9840 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
9841
9842 </ol>
9843
9844 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
9845 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
9846 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
9847 the needed packages.</p>
9848
9849 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
9850 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
9851 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
9852 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
9853 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
9854 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
9855
9856 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
9857 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
9858 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
9859
9860 <p><pre>
9861 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
9862 DESKTOP="lxde"
9863 </pre></p>
9864
9865 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
9866 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
9867 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
9868 boot.</p>
9869
9870       </div>
9871       <div class="tags">
9872
9873
9874         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9875
9876
9877       </div>
9878     </div>
9879     <div class="padding"></div>
9880
9881     <div class="entry">
9882       <div class="title">
9883         <a href="https://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>
9884       </div>
9885       <div class="date">
9886         11th May 2013
9887       </div>
9888       <div class="body">
9889         <P>In January,
9890 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
9891 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
9892 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
9893 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
9894 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
9895 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
9896 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
9897 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
9898 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
9899 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
9900 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
9901 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
9902
9903 <p><table>
9904 <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>
9905 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
9906 <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>
9907 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
9908 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
9909 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
9910 <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>
9911 <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>
9912 <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>
9913 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
9914 </table></p>
9915
9916 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
9917 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
9918 available in experimental.</p>
9919
9920 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
9921 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
9922 for LEGO designers.</p>
9923
9924       </div>
9925       <div class="tags">
9926
9927
9928         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
9929
9930
9931       </div>
9932     </div>
9933     <div class="padding"></div>
9934
9935     <div class="entry">
9936       <div class="title">
9937         <a href="https://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>
9938       </div>
9939       <div class="date">
9940          5th May 2013
9941       </div>
9942       <div class="body">
9943         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
9944 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
9945 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
9946 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
9947 soon.</p>
9948
9949 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
9950 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
9951 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
9952 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
9953 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
9954 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
9955 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
9956 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
9957 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
9958 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
9959 Edu.</a>
9960
9961 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
9962 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
9963 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
9964 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
9965 follow.<p>
9966
9967       </div>
9968       <div class="tags">
9969
9970
9971         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9972
9973
9974       </div>
9975     </div>
9976     <div class="padding"></div>
9977
9978     <div class="entry">
9979       <div class="title">
9980         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
9981       </div>
9982       <div class="date">
9983          3rd April 2013
9984       </div>
9985       <div class="body">
9986         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
9987 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
9988 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
9989 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
9990
9991 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
9992 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
9993 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
9994 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
9995 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
9996 BTS. :)</p>
9997
9998       </div>
9999       <div class="tags">
10000
10001
10002         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10003
10004
10005       </div>
10006     </div>
10007     <div class="padding"></div>
10008
10009     <div class="entry">
10010       <div class="title">
10011         <a href="https://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>
10012       </div>
10013       <div class="date">
10014          2nd February 2013
10015       </div>
10016       <div class="body">
10017         <p>My
10018 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
10019 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
10020 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
10021 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
10022 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
10023 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
10024 version too.</p>
10025
10026 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
10027 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
10028 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
10029 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
10030 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
10031 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
10032 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
10033 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
10034
10035 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
10036 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
10037 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
10038 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
10039 it. :)</p>
10040
10041 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10042 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10043 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10044
10045       </div>
10046       <div class="tags">
10047
10048
10049         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10050
10051
10052       </div>
10053     </div>
10054     <div class="padding"></div>
10055
10056     <div class="entry">
10057       <div class="title">
10058         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
10059       </div>
10060       <div class="date">
10061         22nd January 2013
10062       </div>
10063       <div class="body">
10064         <p>Yesterday, I
10065 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
10066 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
10067 pluggable hardware devices, which I
10068 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
10069 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
10070 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
10071 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
10072 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
10073 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
10074 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
10075 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
10076 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
10077 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
10078
10079 <pre>
10080 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
10081 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
10082 </pre>
10083
10084 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
10085 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
10086 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
10087 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
10088
10089 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
10090 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
10091 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
10092 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
10093 word.</p>
10094
10095 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
10096 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
10097 process.</p>
10098
10099 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
10100 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
10101
10102       </div>
10103       <div class="tags">
10104
10105
10106         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10107
10108
10109       </div>
10110     </div>
10111     <div class="padding"></div>
10112
10113     <div class="entry">
10114       <div class="title">
10115         <a href="https://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>
10116       </div>
10117       <div class="date">
10118         21st January 2013
10119       </div>
10120       <div class="body">
10121         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
10122 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
10123 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
10124 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
10125 it, fetch the
10126 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
10127 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
10128 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
10129 autostart script.</p>
10130
10131 <p>The design is simple:</p>
10132
10133 <ul>
10134
10135 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
10136 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
10137
10138 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
10139 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
10140 initially did.</li>
10141
10142 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
10143 the APT database, a database
10144 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
10145 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
10146
10147 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
10148 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
10149 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
10150 package or packages.</li>
10151
10152 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
10153 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
10154
10155 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
10156 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
10157
10158 </ul>
10159
10160 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
10161 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
10162 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
10163 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
10164
10165 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
10166 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
10167 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
10168 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
10169 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
10170
10171 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
10172 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
10173 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
10174 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
10175 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
10176 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
10177 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
10178 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
10179
10180 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
10181 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
10182 '<tt>svn checkout
10183 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
10184 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
10185 devscripts package.</p>
10186
10187 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
10188 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
10189 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
10190 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
10191 instructions</a> for details.</p>
10192
10193       </div>
10194       <div class="tags">
10195
10196
10197         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10198
10199
10200       </div>
10201     </div>
10202     <div class="padding"></div>
10203
10204     <div class="entry">
10205       <div class="title">
10206         <a href="https://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>
10207       </div>
10208       <div class="date">
10209         19th January 2013
10210       </div>
10211       <div class="body">
10212         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
10213 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
10214 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
10215 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
10216 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
10217 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
10218 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
10219 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
10220 not a durable solution.
10221
10222 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
10223 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
10224
10225 <ul>
10226
10227 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
10228   than A4).</li>
10229 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
10230 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
10231 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
10232 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
10233 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
10234 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
10235 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
10236 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
10237 size).</li>
10238 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
10239   X.org packages.</li>
10240 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
10241   the time).
10242
10243 </ul>
10244
10245 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
10246 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
10247 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
10248 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
10249 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
10250 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
10251 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
10252 still be useful.</p>
10253
10254 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
10255 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
10256 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
10257 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
10258 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
10259 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
10260
10261       </div>
10262       <div class="tags">
10263
10264
10265         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10266
10267
10268       </div>
10269     </div>
10270     <div class="padding"></div>
10271
10272     <div class="entry">
10273       <div class="title">
10274         <a href="https://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>
10275       </div>
10276       <div class="date">
10277         18th January 2013
10278       </div>
10279       <div class="body">
10280         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
10281 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
10282 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
10283 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
10284 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
10285 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
10286 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
10287
10288 <pre>
10289 #!/usr/bin/python
10290 import sys
10291 import apt
10292 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
10293     cache = apt.Cache()
10294     cache.open(None)
10295     thepkgs = []
10296     for pkg in cache:
10297         version = pkg.candidate
10298         if version is None:
10299             version = pkg.installed
10300         if version is None:
10301             continue
10302         record = version.record
10303         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
10304             continue
10305         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
10306         for t in mime_types:
10307             t = t.rstrip().strip()
10308             if t == mimetype:
10309                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
10310     return thepkgs
10311 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
10312 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
10313     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
10314 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
10315 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
10316     print "  %s" %pkg
10317 </pre>
10318
10319 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
10320
10321 <pre>
10322 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
10323 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
10324   gecko-mediaplayer
10325 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
10326 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
10327   browser-plugin-gnash
10328 %
10329 </pre>
10330
10331 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
10332 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
10333 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
10334 anyone working on adding it?</p>
10335
10336 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
10337 request for icweasel support for this feature is
10338 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
10339 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
10340 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
10341 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
10342
10343       </div>
10344       <div class="tags">
10345
10346
10347         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10348
10349
10350       </div>
10351     </div>
10352     <div class="padding"></div>
10353
10354     <div class="entry">
10355       <div class="title">
10356         <a href="https://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>
10357       </div>
10358       <div class="date">
10359         16th January 2013
10360       </div>
10361       <div class="body">
10362         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
10363 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
10364 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
10365 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
10366 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
10367 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
10368 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
10369 downloaded by the browser.</p>
10370
10371 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
10372 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
10373 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
10374 can be found on the
10375 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
10376 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
10377 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
10378 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
10379 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
10380
10381 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
10382
10383 <pre>
10384   count MIME type
10385   ----- -----------------------
10386      32 text/plain
10387      30 audio/mpeg
10388      29 image/png
10389      28 image/jpeg
10390      27 application/ogg
10391      26 audio/x-mp3
10392      25 image/tiff
10393      25 image/gif
10394      22 image/bmp
10395      22 audio/x-wav
10396      20 audio/x-flac
10397      19 audio/x-mpegurl
10398      18 video/x-ms-asf
10399      18 audio/x-musepack
10400      18 audio/x-mpeg
10401      18 application/x-ogg
10402      17 video/mpeg
10403      17 audio/x-scpls
10404      17 audio/ogg
10405      16 video/x-ms-wmv
10406 </pre>
10407
10408 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
10409
10410 <pre>
10411   count MIME type
10412   ----- -----------------------
10413      33 text/plain
10414      32 image/png
10415      32 image/jpeg
10416      29 audio/mpeg
10417      27 image/gif
10418      26 image/tiff
10419      26 application/ogg
10420      25 audio/x-mp3
10421      22 image/bmp
10422      21 audio/x-wav
10423      19 audio/x-mpegurl
10424      19 audio/x-mpeg
10425      18 video/mpeg
10426      18 audio/x-scpls
10427      18 audio/x-flac
10428      18 application/x-ogg
10429      17 video/x-ms-asf
10430      17 text/html
10431      17 audio/x-musepack
10432      16 image/x-xbitmap
10433 </pre>
10434
10435 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
10436
10437 <pre>
10438   count MIME type
10439   ----- -----------------------
10440      31 text/plain
10441      31 image/png
10442      31 image/jpeg
10443      29 audio/mpeg
10444      28 application/ogg
10445      27 image/gif
10446      26 image/tiff
10447      26 audio/x-mp3
10448      23 audio/x-wav
10449      22 image/bmp
10450      21 audio/x-flac
10451      20 audio/x-mpegurl
10452      19 audio/x-mpeg
10453      18 video/x-ms-asf
10454      18 video/mpeg
10455      18 audio/x-scpls
10456      18 application/x-ogg
10457      17 audio/x-musepack
10458      16 video/x-ms-wmv
10459      16 video/x-msvideo
10460 </pre>
10461
10462 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
10463 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
10464 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
10465 issues.</p>
10466
10467 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
10468 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
10469
10470       </div>
10471       <div class="tags">
10472
10473
10474         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10475
10476
10477       </div>
10478     </div>
10479     <div class="padding"></div>
10480
10481     <div class="entry">
10482       <div class="title">
10483         <a href="https://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>
10484       </div>
10485       <div class="date">
10486         15th January 2013
10487       </div>
10488       <div class="body">
10489         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
10490 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
10491 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
10492 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
10493 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
10494 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
10495 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
10496 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
10497 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
10498 packages.</p>
10499
10500 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
10501 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
10502 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
10503 modalias.</p>
10504
10505 <p><blockquote>
10506 Package: package-name
10507 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
10508 </blockquote></p>
10509
10510 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
10511 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
10512
10513 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
10514 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
10515
10516 <p><blockquote>
10517 Package: cheese
10518 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
10519 </blockquote></p>
10520
10521 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
10522 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
10523
10524 <p><blockquote>
10525 Package: pcmciautils
10526 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
10527 </blockquote></p>
10528
10529 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
10530 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
10531
10532 <p><blockquote>
10533 Package: colorhug-client
10534 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
10535 </blockquote></p>
10536
10537 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
10538 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
10539 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
10540
10541 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
10542 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
10543 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
10544 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
10545 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
10546 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
10547 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
10548 Raring.</p>
10549
10550 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
10551 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
10552 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
10553 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
10554 try the
10555 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
10556 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
10557 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
10558 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
10559
10560 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
10561 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
10562
10563 <p><blockquote>
10564 % ./hw-support-lookup
10565 <br>yubikey-personalization
10566 <br>%
10567 </blockquote></p>
10568
10569 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
10570 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
10571
10572 <p><blockquote>
10573 % ./hw-support-lookup
10574 <br>pcmciautils
10575 <br>%
10576 </blockquote></p>
10577
10578 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
10579 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
10580 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
10581
10582 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
10583 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
10584 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
10585 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
10586 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
10587 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
10588 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
10589 see if it work.</p>
10590
10591 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
10592 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
10593 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
10594 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
10595
10596       </div>
10597       <div class="tags">
10598
10599
10600         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10601
10602
10603       </div>
10604     </div>
10605     <div class="padding"></div>
10606
10607     <div class="entry">
10608       <div class="title">
10609         <a href="https://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>
10610       </div>
10611       <div class="date">
10612         14th January 2013
10613       </div>
10614       <div class="body">
10615         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
10616 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
10617 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
10618 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
10619 in
10620 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
10621 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
10622
10623 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
10624
10625 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
10626 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
10627 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
10628 &lt;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> &gt;,
10629 &lt;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> &gt; and
10630 &lt;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> &gt;.
10631
10632 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
10633 this shell script:</p>
10634
10635 <pre>
10636 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
10637 </pre>
10638
10639 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
10640 using modinfo:</p>
10641
10642 <pre>
10643 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
10644 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
10645 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
10646 %
10647 </pre>
10648
10649 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
10650
10651 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
10652 Bridge memory controller:</p>
10653
10654 <p><blockquote>
10655 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
10656 </blockquote></p>
10657
10658 <p>This represent these values:</p>
10659
10660 <pre>
10661  v   00008086  (vendor)
10662  d   00002770  (device)
10663  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
10664  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
10665  bc  06        (bus class)
10666  sc  00        (bus subclass)
10667  i   00        (interface)
10668 </pre>
10669
10670 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
10671 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
10672 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
10673 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
10674
10675 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
10676 means.</p>
10677
10678 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
10679
10680 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
10681 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
10682
10683 <p><blockquote>
10684 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
10685 </blockquote></p>
10686
10687 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
10688
10689 <pre>
10690  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
10691  p    0001  (device product)
10692  d    0206  (bcddevice)
10693  dc     09  (device class)
10694  dsc    00  (device subclass)
10695  dp     00  (device protocol)
10696  ic     09  (interface class)
10697  isc    00  (interface subclass)
10698  ip     00  (interface protocol)
10699 </pre>
10700
10701 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
10702 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
10703 these alias entries show up:</p>
10704
10705 <p><blockquote>
10706 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
10707 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
10708 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
10709 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
10710 </blockquote></p>
10711
10712 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
10713 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
10714 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
10715
10716 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
10717
10718 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
10719 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
10720
10721 <p><blockquote>
10722 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
10723 </blockquote></p>
10724
10725 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
10726
10727 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
10728
10729 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
10730 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
10731 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
10732
10733 <p><blockquote>
10734 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
10735 </blockquote></p>
10736
10737 <p>The values present are</p>
10738
10739 <pre>
10740  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
10741  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
10742  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
10743  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
10744  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
10745  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
10746  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
10747  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
10748  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
10749  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
10750  ct   10             (chassis type)
10751  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
10752 </pre>
10753
10754 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
10755 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
10756
10757 <pre>
10758   3 Desktop
10759   4 Low Profile Desktop
10760   5 Pizza Box
10761   6 Mini Tower
10762   7 Tower
10763   8 Portable
10764   9 Laptop
10765  10 Notebook
10766  11 Hand Held
10767  12 Docking Station
10768  13 All In One
10769  14 Sub Notebook
10770  15 Space-saving
10771  16 Lunch Box
10772  17 Main Server Chassis
10773  18 Expansion Chassis
10774  19 Sub Chassis
10775  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
10776  21 Peripheral Chassis
10777  22 RAID Chassis
10778  23 Rack Mount Chassis
10779  24 Sealed-case PC
10780  25 Multi-system
10781  26 CompactPCI
10782  27 AdvancedTCA
10783  28 Blade
10784  29 Blade Enclosing
10785 </pre>
10786
10787 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
10788 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
10789 claim it is a desktop.</p>
10790
10791 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
10792
10793 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
10794 test machine:</p>
10795
10796 <p><blockquote>
10797 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
10798 </blockquote></p>
10799
10800 <p>The values present are</p>
10801
10802 <pre>
10803   ty  01  (type)
10804   pr  00  (prototype)
10805   id  00  (id)
10806   ex  00  (extra)
10807 </pre>
10808
10809 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
10810 the valid values are.</p>
10811
10812 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
10813
10814 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
10815 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
10816 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
10817 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
10818 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
10819 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
10820 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
10821
10822 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
10823
10824 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
10825 one can use the following shell script:</p>
10826
10827 <pre>
10828   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
10829     echo "$id" ; \
10830     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
10831   done
10832 </pre>
10833
10834 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
10835 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
10836
10837 <pre>
10838   acpi:ACPI0003:
10839     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
10840   acpi:device:
10841   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
10842   acpi:IBM0068:
10843     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
10844     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
10845     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
10846     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
10847   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
10848     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
10849     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
10850     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
10851   [...]
10852 </pre>
10853
10854 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
10855 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
10856 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
10857 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
10858
10859 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
10860 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
10861 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
10862
10863       </div>
10864       <div class="tags">
10865
10866
10867         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10868
10869
10870       </div>
10871     </div>
10872     <div class="padding"></div>
10873
10874     <div class="entry">
10875       <div class="title">
10876         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
10877       </div>
10878       <div class="date">
10879         10th January 2013
10880       </div>
10881       <div class="body">
10882         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
10883 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
10884 Launcher and updated the Debian package
10885 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
10886 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
10887 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
10888 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
10889 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
10890 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
10891 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
10892 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
10893 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
10894 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
10895 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
10896 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
10897 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
10898 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
10899 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
10900
10901       </div>
10902       <div class="tags">
10903
10904
10905         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
10906
10907
10908       </div>
10909     </div>
10910     <div class="padding"></div>
10911
10912     <div class="entry">
10913       <div class="title">
10914         <a href="https://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>
10915       </div>
10916       <div class="date">
10917          9th January 2013
10918       </div>
10919       <div class="body">
10920         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
10921 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
10922 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
10923 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
10924 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
10925 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
10926 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
10927 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
10928 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
10929 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
10930 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
10931
10932 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
10933 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
10934 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
10935 simple:
10936
10937 <ul>
10938
10939 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
10940   starting when a user log in.</li>
10941
10942 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
10943   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
10944
10945 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
10946   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
10947   packages.</li>
10948
10949 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
10950   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
10951
10952 </ul>
10953
10954 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
10955 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
10956 discover database to find packages and
10957 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
10958 packages.</p>
10959
10960 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
10961 draft package is now checked into
10962 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
10963 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
10964 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
10965 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
10966 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
10967 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
10968 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
10969 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
10970 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
10971 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
10972 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
10973 because of the freeze).</p>
10974
10975 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
10976 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
10977 inserted):</p>
10978
10979 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
10980
10981 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
10982 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
10983 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
10984
10985 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
10986 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
10987 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
10988 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
10989 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
10990 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
10991 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
10992
10993 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
10994 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
10995 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
10996 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
10997 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
10998 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
10999 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
11000 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
11001 not be installed?</p>
11002
11003 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
11004 please send me an email. :)</p>
11005
11006       </div>
11007       <div class="tags">
11008
11009
11010         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
11011
11012
11013       </div>
11014     </div>
11015     <div class="padding"></div>
11016
11017     <div class="entry">
11018       <div class="title">
11019         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
11020       </div>
11021       <div class="date">
11022          2nd January 2013
11023       </div>
11024       <div class="body">
11025         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
11026 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
11027 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
11028 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
11029 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
11030 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
11031 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
11032 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
11033 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
11034 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
11035
11036 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
11037 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
11038 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
11039
11040       </div>
11041       <div class="tags">
11042
11043
11044         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
11045
11046
11047       </div>
11048     </div>
11049     <div class="padding"></div>
11050
11051     <div class="entry">
11052       <div class="title">
11053         <a href="https://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>
11054       </div>
11055       <div class="date">
11056         25th December 2012
11057       </div>
11058       <div class="body">
11059         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
11060 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
11061
11062 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
11063 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
11064 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
11065 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
11066 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
11067 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
11068 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
11069 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
11070 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
11071 name.</p>
11072
11073 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
11074 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
11075 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
11076
11077 <blockquote><pre>
11078 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
11079 cd bitcoin
11080 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
11081 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
11082 </pre></blockquote>
11083
11084 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
11085 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
11086 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
11087 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
11088 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
11089 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
11090 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
11091 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
11092 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
11093
11094 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11095 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11096 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11097
11098       </div>
11099       <div class="tags">
11100
11101
11102         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11103
11104
11105       </div>
11106     </div>
11107     <div class="padding"></div>
11108
11109     <div class="entry">
11110       <div class="title">
11111         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
11112       </div>
11113       <div class="date">
11114         21st December 2012
11115       </div>
11116       <div class="body">
11117         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
11118 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
11119 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
11120 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
11121 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
11122 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
11123 is now maintained by a
11124 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
11125 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
11126 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
11127 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
11128 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
11129 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
11130 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
11131 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
11132 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
11133 Corallo in a
11134 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
11135 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
11136 Debian package.</p>
11137
11138 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
11139 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
11140 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
11141 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
11142 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
11143 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
11144 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
11145 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
11146 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
11147 new version to unstable.
11148
11149 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
11150 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
11151 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
11152 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
11153 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
11154 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
11155 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
11156 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
11157 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
11158 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
11159 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
11160 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
11161 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
11162 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
11163 have not tested them.</p>
11164
11165 <p>My
11166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
11167 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
11168 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
11169 years ago, as can be
11170 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
11171 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
11172 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
11173 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
11174 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
11175 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
11176 the same address as last time,
11177 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11178
11179       </div>
11180       <div class="tags">
11181
11182
11183         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11184
11185
11186       </div>
11187     </div>
11188     <div class="padding"></div>
11189
11190     <div class="entry">
11191       <div class="title">
11192         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11193       </div>
11194       <div class="date">
11195          7th September 2012
11196       </div>
11197       <div class="body">
11198         <p>As I
11199 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
11200 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
11201 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
11202 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
11203 repository for the project</a>.</p>
11204
11205 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
11206 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
11207 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
11208 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
11209
11210 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
11211 PostScript formats at
11212 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
11213 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
11214
11215       </div>
11216       <div class="tags">
11217
11218
11219         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
11220
11221
11222       </div>
11223     </div>
11224     <div class="padding"></div>
11225
11226     <div class="entry">
11227       <div class="title">
11228         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
11229       </div>
11230       <div class="date">
11231         16th August 2012
11232       </div>
11233       <div class="body">
11234         <p>I dag fyller
11235 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
11236 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
11237 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
11238
11239       </div>
11240       <div class="tags">
11241
11242
11243         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
11244
11245
11246       </div>
11247     </div>
11248     <div class="padding"></div>
11249
11250     <div class="entry">
11251       <div class="title">
11252         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11253       </div>
11254       <div class="date">
11255         24th June 2012
11256       </div>
11257       <div class="body">
11258         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
11259 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
11260 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
11261 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
11262 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
11263 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
11264 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
11265 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
11266 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
11267 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
11268 missing in my book.</p>
11269
11270 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
11271 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
11272 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
11273 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
11274 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
11275 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
11276 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
11277
11278       </div>
11279       <div class="tags">
11280
11281
11282         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
11283
11284
11285       </div>
11286     </div>
11287     <div class="padding"></div>
11288
11289     <div class="entry">
11290       <div class="title">
11291         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
11292       </div>
11293       <div class="date">
11294         21st November 2011
11295       </div>
11296       <div class="body">
11297         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
11298 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
11299 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
11300 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
11301 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
11302 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
11303 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
11304 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
11305 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
11306 the tools to do so.</p>
11307
11308 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
11309 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
11310 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
11311 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
11312
11313 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
11314 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
11315 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
11316 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
11317 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
11318 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
11319 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
11320 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
11321
11322 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
11323 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
11324 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
11325
11326 <p><pre>
11327 #!/usr/bin/perl
11328 use strict;
11329 use warnings;
11330 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
11331 BEGIN {
11332     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
11333     my %rhelmodules = (
11334         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
11335         );
11336     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
11337         eval "use $module;";
11338         if ($@) {
11339             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
11340             system("yum install -y $pkg");
11341             eval "use $module;";
11342         }
11343     }
11344 }
11345 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
11346
11347 upgrade_dell();
11348
11349 exit 0;
11350
11351 sub run_firmware_script {
11352     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
11353     unless ($script) {
11354         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
11355         exit 1
11356     }
11357     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
11358
11359     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
11360         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
11361     } else {
11362         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
11363     }
11364 }
11365
11366 sub run_firmware_scripts {
11367     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
11368     # Run firmware packages
11369     for my $dir (@dirs) {
11370         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
11371         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
11372         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
11373             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
11374             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
11375         }
11376         closedir $dh;
11377     }
11378 }
11379
11380 sub download {
11381     my $url = shift;
11382     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
11383     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
11384 }
11385
11386 sub upgrade_dell {
11387     my @dirs;
11388     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
11389     chomp $product;
11390
11391     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
11392
11393         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
11394         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
11395
11396         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
11397             CLEANUP => 1
11398             );
11399         chdir($tmpdir);
11400         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
11401         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
11402         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
11403         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
11404         my $fwopts = "-q";
11405         if (@paths) {
11406             for my $url (@paths) {
11407                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
11408             }
11409             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
11410         } else {
11411             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
11412             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
11413         }
11414         chdir('/');
11415     } else {
11416         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
11417         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
11418     }
11419 }
11420
11421 sub fetch_dell_fw {
11422     my $path = shift;
11423     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
11424     download($url);
11425 }
11426
11427 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
11428 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
11429 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
11430 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
11431     my $filename = shift;
11432
11433     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
11434     chomp $product;
11435     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
11436
11437     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
11438
11439     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
11440     my @paths;
11441     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
11442         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
11443         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
11444         my $oscode;
11445         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
11446             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
11447         } else {
11448             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
11449         }
11450         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
11451         {
11452             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
11453         }
11454     }
11455     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
11456         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
11457
11458         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
11459         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
11460
11461         my $cpath = $component->{path};
11462         for my $path (@paths) {
11463             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
11464                 push(@paths, $cpath);
11465             }
11466         }
11467     }
11468     return @paths;
11469 }
11470 </pre>
11471
11472 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
11473 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
11474 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
11475 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
11476 outdated.</p>
11477
11478       </div>
11479       <div class="tags">
11480
11481
11482         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11483
11484
11485       </div>
11486     </div>
11487     <div class="padding"></div>
11488
11489     <div class="entry">
11490       <div class="title">
11491         <a href="https://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>
11492       </div>
11493       <div class="date">
11494          4th August 2011
11495       </div>
11496       <div class="body">
11497         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
11498 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
11499 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
11500 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
11501 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
11502 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
11503 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
11504 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
11505 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
11506
11507 <p><blockquote>
11508 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
11509 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
11510 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
11511 </blockquote></p>
11512
11513 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
11514 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
11515 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
11516 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
11517 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
11518 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
11519 hard to explain.</p>
11520
11521 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
11522 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
11523 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
11524 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
11525 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
11526 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
11527 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
11528 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
11529 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
11530 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
11531 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
11532 mode).</p>
11533
11534 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
11535 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
11536 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
11537 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
11538 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
11539 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
11540 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
11541 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
11542 after visiting single user mode.</p>
11543
11544 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
11545 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
11546 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
11547 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
11548 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
11549 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
11550 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
11551 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
11552
11553 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
11554 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
11555 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
11556
11557       </div>
11558       <div class="tags">
11559
11560
11561         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11562
11563
11564       </div>
11565     </div>
11566     <div class="padding"></div>
11567
11568     <div class="entry">
11569       <div class="title">
11570         <a href="https://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>
11571       </div>
11572       <div class="date">
11573         30th July 2011
11574       </div>
11575       <div class="body">
11576         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
11577 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
11578 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
11579 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
11580 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
11581 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
11582 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
11583 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
11584 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
11585 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
11586 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
11587 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
11588 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
11589
11590 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
11591 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
11592 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
11593 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
11594 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
11595 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
11596 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
11597 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
11598 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
11599
11600 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
11601 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
11602 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
11603 is presented.</p>
11604
11605 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
11606 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
11607 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
11608 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
11609 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
11610 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
11611 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
11612 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
11613 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
11614 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
11615 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
11616 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
11617 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
11618 find time to push this forward.</p>
11619
11620       </div>
11621       <div class="tags">
11622
11623
11624         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11625
11626
11627       </div>
11628     </div>
11629     <div class="padding"></div>
11630
11631     <div class="entry">
11632       <div class="title">
11633         <a href="https://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>
11634       </div>
11635       <div class="date">
11636         29th July 2011
11637       </div>
11638       <div class="body">
11639         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
11640 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
11641 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
11642 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
11643 issues.</p>
11644
11645 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
11646 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
11647 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
11648
11649 <ol>
11650
11651 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
11652 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
11653 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
11654 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
11655 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
11656 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
11657 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
11658 Debian.</li>
11659
11660 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
11661 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
11662 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
11663 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
11664 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
11665 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
11666 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
11667 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
11668 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
11669 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
11670 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
11671 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
11672 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
11673
11674 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
11675 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
11676 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
11677 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
11678 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
11679 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
11680 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
11681 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
11682 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
11683 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
11684
11685 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
11686 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
11687 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
11688 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
11689 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
11690 latter behaviour.</li>
11691
11692 </ol>
11693
11694 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
11695 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
11696 it do not matter much.</p>
11697
11698 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
11699 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
11700 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
11701
11702       </div>
11703       <div class="tags">
11704
11705
11706         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11707
11708
11709       </div>
11710     </div>
11711     <div class="padding"></div>
11712
11713     <div class="entry">
11714       <div class="title">
11715         <a href="https://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>
11716       </div>
11717       <div class="date">
11718         26th July 2011
11719       </div>
11720       <div class="body">
11721         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
11722 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
11723 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
11724 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
11725 security support for a few years.</p>
11726
11727 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
11728 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
11729 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
11730 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
11731 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
11732 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
11733 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
11734 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
11735 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
11736 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
11737 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
11738 easier in the future.</p>
11739
11740 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
11741 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
11742 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
11743 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
11744 do not have time for.</p>
11745
11746       </div>
11747       <div class="tags">
11748
11749
11750         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
11751
11752
11753       </div>
11754     </div>
11755     <div class="padding"></div>
11756
11757     <div class="entry">
11758       <div class="title">
11759         <a href="https://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>
11760       </div>
11761       <div class="date">
11762          3rd April 2011
11763       </div>
11764       <div class="body">
11765         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
11766 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
11767 update in English.</p>
11768
11769 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
11770 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
11771 of the British service
11772 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
11773 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
11774 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
11775 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
11776 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
11777 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
11778 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
11779 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
11780 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
11781 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
11782 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
11783 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
11784 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
11785
11786 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
11787 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
11788 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
11789 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
11790 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
11791 public infrastructure.</p>
11792
11793 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
11794 such service?</p>
11795
11796       </div>
11797       <div class="tags">
11798
11799
11800         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
11801
11802
11803       </div>
11804     </div>
11805     <div class="padding"></div>
11806
11807     <div class="entry">
11808       <div class="title">
11809         <a href="https://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>
11810       </div>
11811       <div class="date">
11812         28th January 2011
11813       </div>
11814       <div class="body">
11815         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
11816 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
11817 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
11818 available on the Internet, and check our locally
11819 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
11820 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
11821 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
11822 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
11823 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
11824 out which security holes were present in our free software
11825 collection.</p>
11826
11827 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
11828 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
11829 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
11830 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
11831 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
11832 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
11833 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
11834 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
11835 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
11836 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
11837 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
11838 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
11839 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
11840 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
11841 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
11842 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
11843
11844 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
11845 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
11846 check out, one could look up
11847 <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
11848 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
11849 The most recent one is
11850 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
11851 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
11852 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
11853
11854 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
11855 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
11856 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
11857 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
11858 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
11859 security issues out.</p>
11860
11861 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
11862 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
11863 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
11864 RHEL is providing
11865 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
11866 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
11867 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
11868
11869 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
11870 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
11871 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
11872 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
11873 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
11874 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
11875 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
11876 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
11877 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
11878 established soon.</p>
11879
11880 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
11881 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
11882 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
11883 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
11884 for their packages.</p>
11885
11886       </div>
11887       <div class="tags">
11888
11889
11890         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
11891
11892
11893       </div>
11894     </div>
11895     <div class="padding"></div>
11896
11897     <div class="entry">
11898       <div class="title">
11899         <a href="https://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>
11900       </div>
11901       <div class="date">
11902         23rd January 2011
11903       </div>
11904       <div class="body">
11905         <p>In the
11906 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
11907 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
11908 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
11909 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
11910 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
11911 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
11912 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
11913 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
11914 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
11915 one of my machines like this:</p>
11916
11917 <pre>
11918 loaded modules:
11919 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
11920 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
11921 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
11922 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
11923 10de:03ec pata_amd
11924 10de:03f6 sata_nv
11925 1022:1103 k8temp
11926 109e:036e bttv
11927 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
11928 11ab:4364 sky2
11929 </pre>
11930
11931 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
11932 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
11933
11934 <pre>
11935 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
11936     echo loaded pci modules:
11937     (
11938         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
11939         for address in * ; do
11940             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
11941                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
11942                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
11943                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
11944                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
11945                     echo "$id $module"
11946                 fi
11947             fi
11948         done
11949     )
11950     echo
11951 fi
11952 </pre>
11953
11954 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
11955 mappings:</p>
11956
11957 <pre>
11958 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
11959     echo loaded usb modules:
11960     (
11961         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
11962         for address in * ; do
11963             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
11964                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
11965                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
11966                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
11967                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
11968                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
11969                         echo "$id $module"
11970                     fi
11971                 fi
11972             fi
11973         done
11974     )
11975     echo
11976 fi
11977 </pre>
11978
11979 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
11980 well.</p>
11981
11982       </div>
11983       <div class="tags">
11984
11985
11986         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11987
11988
11989       </div>
11990     </div>
11991     <div class="padding"></div>
11992
11993     <div class="entry">
11994       <div class="title">
11995         <a href="https://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>
11996       </div>
11997       <div class="date">
11998         22nd December 2010
11999       </div>
12000       <div class="body">
12001         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
12002 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
12003 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
12004 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
12005 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
12006 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
12007 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
12008 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
12009 university.</p>
12010
12011 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
12012 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
12013 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
12014 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
12015 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
12016 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
12017 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
12018 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
12019
12020 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
12021 I perform on a new model.</p>
12022
12023 <ul>
12024
12025 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
12026 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
12027 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
12028
12029 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
12030 installation, X.org is working.</li>
12031
12032 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
12033 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
12034 reported by the program.</li>
12035
12036 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
12037 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
12038 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
12039 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
12040 normally test this by playing
12041 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
12042 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
12043
12044 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
12045 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
12046
12047 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
12048 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
12049
12050 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
12051 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
12052
12053 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
12054 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
12055 few.</li>
12056
12057 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
12058 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
12059 notice this.</li>
12060
12061 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
12062 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
12063 resume.</li>
12064
12065 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
12066 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
12067 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
12068 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
12069 not.</li>
12070
12071 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
12072 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
12073 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
12074 existence.</li>
12075
12076 </ul>
12077
12078 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
12079 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
12080 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
12081 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
12082 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
12083 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
12084 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
12085 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
12086
12087       </div>
12088       <div class="tags">
12089
12090
12091         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12092
12093
12094       </div>
12095     </div>
12096     <div class="padding"></div>
12097
12098     <div class="entry">
12099       <div class="title">
12100         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
12101       </div>
12102       <div class="date">
12103         11th December 2010
12104       </div>
12105       <div class="body">
12106         <p>As I continue to explore
12107 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
12108 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
12109 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
12110
12111 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
12112 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
12113 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
12114 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
12115 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
12116 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
12117 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
12118 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
12119 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
12120 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
12121 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
12122 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
12123 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
12124 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
12125 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
12126 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
12127 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
12128 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
12129 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
12130 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
12131
12132 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
12133 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
12134 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
12135 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
12136 If the Skolelinux foundation
12137 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
12138 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
12139 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
12140 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
12141 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
12142 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
12143 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
12144 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
12145
12146 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
12147 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
12148 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
12149 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
12150 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
12151 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
12152 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
12153 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
12154 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
12155 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
12156 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
12157 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
12158 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
12159 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
12160 currencies.</p>
12161
12162 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
12163 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
12164 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
12165 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
12166 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
12167 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
12168 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
12169 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
12170 BitCoins.  Check out
12171 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
12172 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
12173 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
12174 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
12175 yet.</p>
12176
12177 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
12178 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
12179 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
12180 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
12181 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
12182
12183       </div>
12184       <div class="tags">
12185
12186
12187         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
12188
12189
12190       </div>
12191     </div>
12192     <div class="padding"></div>
12193
12194     <div class="entry">
12195       <div class="title">
12196         <a href="https://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>
12197       </div>
12198       <div class="date">
12199         10th December 2010
12200       </div>
12201       <div class="body">
12202         <p>With this weeks lawless
12203 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
12204 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
12205 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
12206 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
12207 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
12208 A blog post from
12209 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
12210 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
12211 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
12212 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
12213 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
12214 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
12215 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
12216
12217 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
12218 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
12219 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
12220 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
12221 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
12222 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
12223 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
12224 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
12225 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
12226 Debian</a> soon.</p>
12227
12228 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
12229 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
12230 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
12231 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
12232 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
12233 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
12234 you can even get
12235 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
12236 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
12237 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
12238 on the current exchange rates.</p>
12239
12240 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
12241 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
12242 donations to the address
12243 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
12244
12245       </div>
12246       <div class="tags">
12247
12248
12249         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
12250
12251
12252       </div>
12253     </div>
12254     <div class="padding"></div>
12255
12256     <div class="entry">
12257       <div class="title">
12258         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
12259       </div>
12260       <div class="date">
12261         27th November 2010
12262       </div>
12263       <div class="body">
12264         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
12265 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
12266 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
12267 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
12268 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
12269 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
12270 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
12271 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
12272
12273 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
12274 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
12275 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
12276 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
12277 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
12278 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
12279 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
12280 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
12281 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
12282 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
12283 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
12284
12285 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
12286 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
12287 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
12288 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
12289 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
12290 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
12291 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
12292 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
12293 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
12294 what is going on.</p>
12295
12296       </div>
12297       <div class="tags">
12298
12299
12300         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
12301
12302
12303       </div>
12304     </div>
12305     <div class="padding"></div>
12306
12307     <div class="entry">
12308       <div class="title">
12309         <a href="https://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>
12310       </div>
12311       <div class="date">
12312         22nd November 2010
12313       </div>
12314       <div class="body">
12315         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
12316 upgrade testing of the
12317 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
12318 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
12319 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
12320 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
12321
12322 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
12323
12324 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12325
12326 <blockquote><p>
12327   apache2.2-bin
12328   aptdaemon
12329   baobab
12330   binfmt-support
12331   browser-plugin-gnash
12332   cheese-common
12333   cli-common
12334   cups-pk-helper
12335   dmz-cursor-theme
12336   empathy
12337   empathy-common
12338   freedesktop-sound-theme
12339   freeglut3
12340   gconf-defaults-service
12341   gdm-themes
12342   gedit-plugins
12343   geoclue
12344   geoclue-hostip
12345   geoclue-localnet
12346   geoclue-manual
12347   geoclue-yahoo
12348   gnash
12349   gnash-common
12350   gnome
12351   gnome-backgrounds
12352   gnome-cards-data
12353   gnome-codec-install
12354   gnome-core
12355   gnome-desktop-environment
12356   gnome-disk-utility
12357   gnome-screenshot
12358   gnome-search-tool
12359   gnome-session-canberra
12360   gnome-system-log
12361   gnome-themes-extras
12362   gnome-themes-more
12363   gnome-user-share
12364   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
12365   gstreamer0.10-tools
12366   gtk2-engines
12367   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
12368   gtk2-engines-smooth
12369   hamster-applet
12370   libapache2-mod-dnssd
12371   libapr1
12372   libaprutil1
12373   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
12374   libaprutil1-ldap
12375   libart2.0-cil
12376   libboost-date-time1.42.0
12377   libboost-python1.42.0
12378   libboost-thread1.42.0
12379   libchamplain-0.4-0
12380   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
12381   libcheese-gtk18
12382   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
12383   libcryptui0
12384   libdiscid0
12385   libelf1
12386   libepc-1.0-2
12387   libepc-common
12388   libepc-ui-1.0-2
12389   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
12390   libfreerdp0
12391   libgconf2.0-cil
12392   libgdata-common
12393   libgdata7
12394   libgdu-gtk0
12395   libgee2
12396   libgeoclue0
12397   libgexiv2-0
12398   libgif4
12399   libglade2.0-cil
12400   libglib2.0-cil
12401   libgmime2.4-cil
12402   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
12403   libgnome2.24-cil
12404   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
12405   libgpod-common
12406   libgpod4
12407   libgtk2.0-cil
12408   libgtkglext1
12409   libgtksourceview2.0-common
12410   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
12411   libmono-addins0.2-cil
12412   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
12413   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
12414   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
12415   libmono-posix2.0-cil
12416   libmono-security2.0-cil
12417   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
12418   libmono-system2.0-cil
12419   libmtp8
12420   libmusicbrainz3-6
12421   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
12422   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
12423   libopal3.6.8
12424   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
12425   libpt2.6.7
12426   libpython2.6
12427   librpm1
12428   librpmio1
12429   libsdl1.2debian
12430   libsrtp0
12431   libssh-4
12432   libtelepathy-farsight0
12433   libtelepathy-glib0
12434   libtidy-0.99-0
12435   media-player-info
12436   mesa-utils
12437   mono-2.0-gac
12438   mono-gac
12439   mono-runtime
12440   nautilus-sendto
12441   nautilus-sendto-empathy
12442   p7zip-full
12443   pkg-config
12444   python-aptdaemon
12445   python-aptdaemon-gtk
12446   python-axiom
12447   python-beautifulsoup
12448   python-bugbuddy
12449   python-clientform
12450   python-coherence
12451   python-configobj
12452   python-crypto
12453   python-cupshelpers
12454   python-elementtree
12455   python-epsilon
12456   python-evolution
12457   python-feedparser
12458   python-gdata
12459   python-gdbm
12460   python-gst0.10
12461   python-gtkglext1
12462   python-gtksourceview2
12463   python-httplib2
12464   python-louie
12465   python-mako
12466   python-markupsafe
12467   python-mechanize
12468   python-nevow
12469   python-notify
12470   python-opengl
12471   python-openssl
12472   python-pam
12473   python-pkg-resources
12474   python-pyasn1
12475   python-pysqlite2
12476   python-rdflib
12477   python-serial
12478   python-tagpy
12479   python-twisted-bin
12480   python-twisted-conch
12481   python-twisted-core
12482   python-twisted-web
12483   python-utidylib
12484   python-webkit
12485   python-xdg
12486   python-zope.interface
12487   remmina
12488   remmina-plugin-data
12489   remmina-plugin-rdp
12490   remmina-plugin-vnc
12491   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
12492   rhythmbox-plugins
12493   rpm-common
12494   rpm2cpio
12495   seahorse-plugins
12496   shotwell
12497   software-center
12498   system-config-printer-udev
12499   telepathy-gabble
12500   telepathy-mission-control-5
12501   telepathy-salut
12502   tomboy
12503   totem
12504   totem-coherence
12505   totem-mozilla
12506   totem-plugins
12507   transmission-common
12508   xdg-user-dirs
12509   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
12510   xserver-xephyr
12511 </p></blockquote>
12512
12513 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12514
12515 <blockquote><p>
12516   cheese
12517   ekiga
12518   eog
12519   epiphany-extensions
12520   evolution-exchange
12521   fast-user-switch-applet
12522   file-roller
12523   gcalctool
12524   gconf-editor
12525   gdm
12526   gedit
12527   gedit-common
12528   gnome-games
12529   gnome-games-data
12530   gnome-nettool
12531   gnome-system-tools
12532   gnome-themes
12533   gnuchess
12534   gucharmap
12535   guile-1.8-libs
12536   libavahi-ui0
12537   libdmx1
12538   libgalago3
12539   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
12540   libgtksourceview2.0-0
12541   liblircclient0
12542   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
12543   libspeexdsp1
12544   libsvga1
12545   rhythmbox
12546   seahorse
12547   sound-juicer
12548   system-config-printer
12549   totem-common
12550   transmission-gtk
12551   vinagre
12552   vino
12553 </p></blockquote>
12554
12555 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12556
12557 <blockquote><p>
12558   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
12559 </p></blockquote>
12560
12561 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12562
12563 <blockquote><p>
12564 [nothing]
12565 </p></blockquote>
12566
12567 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
12568
12569 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12570
12571 <blockquote><p>
12572   ksmserver
12573 </p></blockquote>
12574
12575 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12576
12577 <blockquote><p>
12578   kwin
12579   network-manager-kde
12580 </p></blockquote>
12581
12582 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12583
12584 <blockquote><p>
12585   arts
12586   dolphin
12587   freespacenotifier
12588   google-gadgets-gst
12589   google-gadgets-xul
12590   kappfinder
12591   kcalc
12592   kcharselect
12593   kde-core
12594   kde-plasma-desktop
12595   kde-standard
12596   kde-window-manager
12597   kdeartwork
12598   kdeartwork-emoticons
12599   kdeartwork-style
12600   kdeartwork-theme-icon
12601   kdebase
12602   kdebase-apps
12603   kdebase-workspace
12604   kdebase-workspace-bin
12605   kdebase-workspace-data
12606   kdeeject
12607   kdelibs
12608   kdeplasma-addons
12609   kdeutils
12610   kdewallpapers
12611   kdf
12612   kfloppy
12613   kgpg
12614   khelpcenter4
12615   kinfocenter
12616   konq-plugins-l10n
12617   konqueror-nsplugins
12618   kscreensaver
12619   kscreensaver-xsavers
12620   ktimer
12621   kwrite
12622   libgle3
12623   libkde4-ruby1.8
12624   libkonq5
12625   libkonq5-templates
12626   libnetpbm10
12627   libplasma-ruby
12628   libplasma-ruby1.8
12629   libqt4-ruby1.8
12630   marble-data
12631   marble-plugins
12632   netpbm
12633   nuvola-icon-theme
12634   plasma-dataengines-workspace
12635   plasma-desktop
12636   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
12637   plasma-runners-addons
12638   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
12639   plasma-scriptengine-python
12640   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
12641   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
12642   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
12643   plasma-scriptengines
12644   plasma-wallpapers-addons
12645   plasma-widget-folderview
12646   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
12647   ruby
12648   sweeper
12649   update-notifier-kde
12650   xscreensaver-data-extra
12651   xscreensaver-gl
12652   xscreensaver-gl-extra
12653   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
12654 </p></blockquote>
12655
12656 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12657
12658 <blockquote><p>
12659   ark
12660   google-gadgets-common
12661   google-gadgets-qt
12662   htdig
12663   kate
12664   kdebase-bin
12665   kdebase-data
12666   kdepasswd
12667   kfind
12668   klipper
12669   konq-plugins
12670   konqueror
12671   ksysguard
12672   ksysguardd
12673   libarchive1
12674   libcln6
12675   libeet1
12676   libeina-svn-06
12677   libggadget-1.0-0b
12678   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
12679   libgps19
12680   libkdecorations4
12681   libkephal4
12682   libkonq4
12683   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
12684   libkscreensaver5
12685   libksgrd4
12686   libksignalplotter4
12687   libkunitconversion4
12688   libkwineffects1a
12689   libmarblewidget4
12690   libntrack-qt4-1
12691   libntrack0
12692   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
12693   libplasmaclock4a
12694   libplasmagenericshell4
12695   libprocesscore4a
12696   libprocessui4a
12697   libqalculate5
12698   libqedje0a
12699   libqtruby4shared2
12700   libqzion0a
12701   libruby1.8
12702   libscim8c2a
12703   libsmokekdecore4-3
12704   libsmokekdeui4-3
12705   libsmokekfile3
12706   libsmokekhtml3
12707   libsmokekio3
12708   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
12709   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
12710   libsmokekparts3
12711   libsmokektexteditor3
12712   libsmokekutils3
12713   libsmokenepomuk3
12714   libsmokephonon3
12715   libsmokeplasma3
12716   libsmokeqtcore4-3
12717   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
12718   libsmokeqtgui4-3
12719   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
12720   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
12721   libsmokeqtscript4-3
12722   libsmokeqtsql4-3
12723   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
12724   libsmokeqttest4-3
12725   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
12726   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
12727   libsmokeqtxml4-3
12728   libsmokesolid3
12729   libsmokesoprano3
12730   libtaskmanager4a
12731   libtidy-0.99-0
12732   libweather-ion4a
12733   libxklavier16
12734   libxxf86misc1
12735   okteta
12736   oxygencursors
12737   plasma-dataengines-addons
12738   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
12739   plasma-widget-lancelot
12740   plasma-widgets-addons
12741   plasma-widgets-workspace
12742   polkit-kde-1
12743   ruby1.8
12744   systemsettings
12745   update-notifier-common
12746 </p></blockquote>
12747
12748 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
12749 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
12750 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
12751 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
12752
12753       </div>
12754       <div class="tags">
12755
12756
12757         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12758
12759
12760       </div>
12761     </div>
12762     <div class="padding"></div>
12763
12764     <div class="entry">
12765       <div class="title">
12766         <a href="https://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>
12767       </div>
12768       <div class="date">
12769         22nd November 2010
12770       </div>
12771       <div class="body">
12772         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
12773 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
12774 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
12775 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
12776 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
12777 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
12778 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
12779 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
12780 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
12781
12782 <p>I found
12783 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
12784 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
12785 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
12786 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
12787 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
12788 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
12789
12790 <pre>
12791 #!/bin/sh
12792
12793 # Based on
12794 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
12795
12796 set -e
12797 set -x
12798
12799 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
12800     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
12801     exit 1
12802 else
12803     host="$1"
12804 fi
12805
12806 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
12807     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
12808     exit 1
12809 fi
12810
12811 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
12812 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
12813 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
12814 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
12815
12816 img=$host.img
12817 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
12818 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
12819
12820 parted $img mklabel msdos
12821 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
12822 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
12823 parted $img set 1 boot on
12824
12825 modprobe dm-mod
12826 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
12827 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
12828
12829 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
12830 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
12831 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
12832
12833 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
12834 losetup -d /dev/loop0
12835 </pre>
12836
12837 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
12838 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
12839
12840 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
12841 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
12842 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
12843 seem to work just fine.</p>
12844
12845       </div>
12846       <div class="tags">
12847
12848
12849         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12850
12851
12852       </div>
12853     </div>
12854     <div class="padding"></div>
12855
12856     <div class="entry">
12857       <div class="title">
12858         <a href="https://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>
12859       </div>
12860       <div class="date">
12861         20th November 2010
12862       </div>
12863       <div class="body">
12864         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
12865 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
12866 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
12867 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
12868
12869 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
12870 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
12871 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
12872
12873 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
12874
12875 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12876
12877 <blockquote><p>
12878   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
12879   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
12880   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
12881   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
12882   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
12883   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
12884   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
12885   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
12886   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
12887   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
12888   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
12889   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
12890   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
12891   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
12892   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
12893   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
12894   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
12895   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
12896   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
12897   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
12898   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
12899   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
12900   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
12901   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
12902   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
12903   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
12904   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
12905   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
12906   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
12907   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
12908   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
12909   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
12910   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
12911   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
12912   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
12913   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
12914   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
12915   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
12916   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
12917   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
12918   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
12919   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
12920   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
12921   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
12922   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
12923   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
12924   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
12925   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
12926   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
12927   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
12928   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
12929   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
12930   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
12931   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
12932   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
12933   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
12934   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
12935   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
12936   zip
12937 </p></blockquote>
12938
12939 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
12940
12941 <blockquote><p>
12942   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
12943   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
12944   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
12945   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
12946   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
12947   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
12948   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
12949   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
12950   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
12951   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
12952   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
12953   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
12954   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
12955   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
12956   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
12957   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
12958   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
12959   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
12960   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
12961   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
12962   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
12963   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
12964   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
12965   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
12966   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
12967   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
12968   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
12969   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
12970   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
12971 </p></blockquote>
12972
12973 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12974
12975 <blockquote><p>
12976   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
12977 </p></blockquote>
12978
12979 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12980
12981 <blockquote><p>
12982 [nothing]
12983 </p></blockquote>
12984
12985 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
12986
12987 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12988
12989 <blockquote><p>
12990   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
12991   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
12992   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
12993   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
12994   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
12995   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
12996   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
12997   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
12998   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
12999   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
13000   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
13001   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
13002   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
13003   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
13004   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
13005   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
13006   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
13007   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
13008   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
13009   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
13010   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
13011   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
13012   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
13013   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
13014   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
13015   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
13016   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
13017   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
13018   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
13019   ttf-sazanami-gothic
13020 </p></blockquote>
13021
13022 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
13023
13024 <blockquote><p>
13025   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
13026   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
13027   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
13028   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
13029   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
13030   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
13031   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
13032   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
13033   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
13034   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
13035   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
13036   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
13037   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
13038   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
13039   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
13040   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
13041   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
13042   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
13043   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
13044   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
13045   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
13046   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
13047   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
13048   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
13049   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
13050   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
13051   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
13052   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
13053   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
13054   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
13055   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
13056   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
13057   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
13058 </p></blockquote>
13059
13060 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13061
13062 <blockquote><p>
13063   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
13064   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
13065   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
13066   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
13067   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
13068   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
13069   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
13070 </p></blockquote>
13071
13072 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13073
13074 <blockquote><p>
13075   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
13076 </p></blockquote>
13077
13078       </div>
13079       <div class="tags">
13080
13081
13082         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13083
13084
13085       </div>
13086     </div>
13087     <div class="padding"></div>
13088
13089     <div class="entry">
13090       <div class="title">
13091         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
13092       </div>
13093       <div class="date">
13094         20th November 2010
13095       </div>
13096       <div class="body">
13097         <p>Answering
13098 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
13099 call from the Gnash project</a> for
13100 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
13101 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
13102 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
13103 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
13104 releases out more often.</p>
13105
13106 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
13107 I have considered setting up a <a
13108 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
13109 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
13110 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
13111 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
13112 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
13113 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
13114 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
13115 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
13116 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
13117 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
13118 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
13119 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
13120
13121       </div>
13122       <div class="tags">
13123
13124
13125         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13126
13127
13128       </div>
13129     </div>
13130     <div class="padding"></div>
13131
13132     <div class="entry">
13133       <div class="title">
13134         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
13135       </div>
13136       <div class="date">
13137          9th November 2010
13138       </div>
13139       <div class="body">
13140         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
13141
13142 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
13143 3D linked in from
13144 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
13145 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
13146
13147       </div>
13148       <div class="tags">
13149
13150
13151         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13152
13153
13154       </div>
13155     </div>
13156     <div class="padding"></div>
13157
13158     <div class="entry">
13159       <div class="title">
13160         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
13161       </div>
13162       <div class="date">
13163         24th October 2010
13164       </div>
13165       <div class="body">
13166         <p>Some updates.</p>
13167
13168 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
13169 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
13170 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
13171 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
13172 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
13173 :)</p>
13174
13175 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
13176 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
13177 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
13178 It is called
13179 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
13180 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
13181 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
13182 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
13183 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
13184 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
13185
13186 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
13187 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
13188 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
13189 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
13190 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
13191 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
13192 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
13193 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
13194 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
13195 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
13196
13197       </div>
13198       <div class="tags">
13199
13200
13201         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
13202
13203
13204       </div>
13205     </div>
13206     <div class="padding"></div>
13207
13208     <div class="entry">
13209       <div class="title">
13210         <a href="https://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>
13211       </div>
13212       <div class="date">
13213          4th September 2010
13214       </div>
13215       <div class="body">
13216         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
13217 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
13218 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
13219 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
13220 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
13221 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
13222 installed.</p>
13223
13224 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
13225 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
13226 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
13227 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
13228 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
13229 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
13230 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
13231 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
13232 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
13233
13234 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
13235 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
13236 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
13237 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
13238 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
13239 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
13240 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
13241 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
13242 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
13243 pages they want to visit.</p>
13244
13245 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
13246 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
13247 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
13248 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
13249 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
13250 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
13251 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
13252 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
13253 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
13254 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
13255 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
13256
13257       </div>
13258       <div class="tags">
13259
13260
13261         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13262
13263
13264       </div>
13265     </div>
13266     <div class="padding"></div>
13267
13268     <div class="entry">
13269       <div class="title">
13270         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
13271       </div>
13272       <div class="date">
13273         27th July 2010
13274       </div>
13275       <div class="body">
13276         <p>I discovered this while doing
13277 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
13278 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
13279 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
13280 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
13281 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
13282
13283 <p>An example is from todays
13284 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
13285 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
13286 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
13287 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
13288 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
13289 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
13290 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
13291
13292 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
13293
13294 <blockquote><pre>
13295 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
13296  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
13297   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
13298 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
13299  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
13300 </pre></blockquote>
13301
13302 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
13303 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
13304 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
13305 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
13306 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
13307 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
13308 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
13309 of dependency loops.</p>
13310
13311 <p>Thanks to
13312 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
13313 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
13314 dependencies
13315 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
13316 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
13317
13318 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
13319 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
13320 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
13321 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
13322 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
13323 it.</p>
13324
13325       </div>
13326       <div class="tags">
13327
13328
13329         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13330
13331
13332       </div>
13333     </div>
13334     <div class="padding"></div>
13335
13336     <div class="entry">
13337       <div class="title">
13338         <a href="https://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>
13339       </div>
13340       <div class="date">
13341         17th July 2010
13342       </div>
13343       <div class="body">
13344         <p>This is a
13345 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
13346 on my
13347 <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
13348 work</a> on
13349 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
13350 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
13351
13352 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
13353 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
13354 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
13355 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
13356
13357 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
13358 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
13359 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
13360
13361 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
13362
13363 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
13364 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
13365 the web.
13366
13367 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
13368 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
13369 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
13370 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
13371 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
13372 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
13373
13374 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
13375 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
13376 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
13377 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
13378 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
13379 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
13380 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
13381 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
13382 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
13383 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
13384 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
13385 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
13386 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
13387 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
13388 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
13389 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
13390
13391 <blockquote><pre>
13392 ldapsearch -h ldap \
13393   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
13394   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
13395   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
13396   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
13397   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
13398   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
13399
13400 ldapsearch -h ldap \
13401   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
13402   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
13403   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
13404   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
13405   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
13406 </pre></blockquote>
13407
13408 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
13409 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
13410 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
13411 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13412 also exist.</p>
13413
13414 <blockquote><pre>
13415 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13416 objectclass: top
13417 objectclass: dnsdomain
13418 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13419 dc: tjener
13420 arecord: 10.0.2.2
13421 associateddomain: tjener.intern
13422
13423 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13424 objectclass: top
13425 objectclass: dnsdomain2
13426 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13427 dc: 2
13428 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
13429 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
13430 </pre></blockquote>
13431
13432 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
13433 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
13434 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
13435 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
13436 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
13437 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
13438 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
13439 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
13440 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
13441 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
13442 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
13443 instead.</p>
13444
13445 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
13446 like this:</p>
13447
13448 <blockquote><pre>
13449 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
13450   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
13451   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
13452   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
13453   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
13454   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
13455
13456 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
13457   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
13458 </pre></blockquote>
13459
13460 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
13461 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
13462 reverse lookups.</p>
13463
13464 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
13465 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
13466 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
13467 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
13468
13469 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
13470 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
13471 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
13472
13473 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
13474 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
13475 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
13476 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
13477 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
13478
13479 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
13480 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
13481 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
13482 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
13483 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
13484
13485 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
13486 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
13487 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
13488 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
13489 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
13490 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
13491
13492 <blockquote><pre>
13493 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
13494     SUP top
13495     AUXILIARY
13496     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
13497           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
13498           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
13499           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
13500           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
13501     ))
13502 </pre></blockquote>
13503
13504 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
13505 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
13506 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
13507 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
13508 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
13509 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
13510
13511 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
13512
13513 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
13514 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
13515 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
13516 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
13517 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
13518
13519 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
13520 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
13521 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
13522 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
13523
13524 <blockquote><pre>
13525 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
13526 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
13527 </pre></blockquote>
13528
13529 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
13530 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
13531 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
13532 search result is this entry:</p>
13533
13534 <blockquote><pre>
13535 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13536 cn: dhcp
13537 objectClass: top
13538 objectClass: dhcpServer
13539 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13540 </pre></blockquote>
13541
13542 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
13543 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
13544 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
13545 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
13546 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
13547 The search result is this entry:</p>
13548
13549 <blockquote><pre>
13550 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13551 cn: DHCP Config
13552 objectClass: top
13553 objectClass: dhcpService
13554 objectClass: dhcpOptions
13555 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13556 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
13557 dhcpStatements: authoritative
13558 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
13559 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
13560 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
13561 </pre></blockquote>
13562
13563 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
13564 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
13565 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
13566 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
13567 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
13568 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
13569 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
13570 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
13571 related computer objects.</p>
13572
13573 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
13574 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
13575 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
13576 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
13577 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
13578 like:</p>
13579
13580 <blockquote><pre>
13581 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13582 cn: hostname
13583 objectClass: top
13584 objectClass: dhcpHost
13585 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
13586 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
13587 </pre></blockquote>
13588
13589 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
13590 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
13591 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
13592 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
13593 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
13594 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
13595 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
13596 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
13597 structural object class.
13598
13599 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
13600
13601 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
13602 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
13603 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
13604 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
13605 in the configuration.</p>
13606
13607 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
13608 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
13609 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
13610 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
13611 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
13612 structure.</p>
13613
13614 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
13615 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
13616
13617 <blockquote><pre>
13618 ou=services
13619   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
13620     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
13621     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
13622       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
13623         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
13624     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
13625       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
13626         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
13627     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
13628       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
13629 </pre></blockquote>
13630
13631 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
13632 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
13633 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
13634 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
13635
13636 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
13637 like this:</p>
13638
13639 <blockquote><pre>
13640 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13641 dc: hostname
13642 objectClass: top
13643 objectClass: dhcpHost
13644 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13645 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
13646 associateddomain: hostname.intern
13647 arecord: 10.11.12.13
13648 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
13649 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
13650 </pre></blockquote>
13651
13652 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
13653 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
13654 auxiliary object class.</p>
13655
13656       </div>
13657       <div class="tags">
13658
13659
13660         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13661
13662
13663       </div>
13664     </div>
13665     <div class="padding"></div>
13666
13667     <div class="entry">
13668       <div class="title">
13669         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
13670       </div>
13671       <div class="date">
13672         14th July 2010
13673       </div>
13674       <div class="body">
13675         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
13676 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
13677 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
13678 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
13679 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
13680
13681 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
13682 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
13683
13684 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
13685 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
13686 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
13687 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
13688 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
13689 to a slave DNS server.</p>
13690
13691 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
13692 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
13693 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
13694 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
13695 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
13696 seem to work.</p>
13697
13698 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
13699 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
13700 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
13701 this:</p>
13702
13703 <blockquote><pre>
13704   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13705   cn: hostname
13706   objectClass: dhcphost
13707   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13708   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
13709   associateddomain: hostname.intern
13710   arecord: 10.11.12.13
13711   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
13712   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
13713   ldapconfigsound: Y
13714 </pre></blockquote>
13715
13716 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
13717 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
13718 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
13719 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
13720
13721 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
13722 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
13723 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
13724 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
13725 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
13726 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
13727 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
13728 might be a good place to put it.</p>
13729
13730 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
13731 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
13732
13733       </div>
13734       <div class="tags">
13735
13736
13737         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13738
13739
13740       </div>
13741     </div>
13742     <div class="padding"></div>
13743
13744     <div class="entry">
13745       <div class="title">
13746         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
13747       </div>
13748       <div class="date">
13749         11th July 2010
13750       </div>
13751       <div class="body">
13752         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
13753 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
13754 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
13755 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
13756
13757 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
13758 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
13759 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
13760 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
13761 LTSP clients.</p>
13762
13763 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
13764 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
13765 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
13766
13767 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
13768 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
13769 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
13770
13771 <blockquote><pre>
13772 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
13773 #
13774 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
13775 #
13776 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
13777 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
13778 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
13779 #
13780 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
13781 # existence of attribute names.
13782 #
13783 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
13784 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
13785 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
13786 #
13787 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
13788 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
13789 #
13790 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
13791 #     SUP top
13792 #     AUXILIARY
13793 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
13794
13795 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
13796 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
13797     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
13798     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
13799         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
13800         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
13801             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
13802             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
13803             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
13804             # bass value on to clients
13805             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
13806         done
13807     done
13808 fi
13809 </pre></blockquote>
13810
13811 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
13812 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
13813 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
13814 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
13815 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
13816
13817 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
13818 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
13819
13820 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
13821 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
13822 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
13823 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
13824 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
13825 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
13826
13827       </div>
13828       <div class="tags">
13829
13830
13831         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13832
13833
13834       </div>
13835     </div>
13836     <div class="padding"></div>
13837
13838     <div class="entry">
13839       <div class="title">
13840         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
13841       </div>
13842       <div class="date">
13843          9th July 2010
13844       </div>
13845       <div class="body">
13846         <p>Since
13847 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
13848 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
13849 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
13850 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
13851 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
13852 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
13853 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
13854 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
13855 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
13856 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
13857 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
13858 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
13859 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
13860
13861       </div>
13862       <div class="tags">
13863
13864
13865         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13866
13867
13868       </div>
13869     </div>
13870     <div class="padding"></div>
13871
13872     <div class="entry">
13873       <div class="title">
13874         <a href="https://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>
13875       </div>
13876       <div class="date">
13877          3rd July 2010
13878       </div>
13879       <div class="body">
13880         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
13881 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
13882 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
13883 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
13884 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
13885 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
13886 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
13887 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
13888
13889 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
13890 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
13891 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
13892 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
13893 publish the difference.</p>
13894
13895 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
13896
13897 <blockquote><p>
13898   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
13899   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
13900   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
13901   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
13902   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
13903   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
13904   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
13905   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
13906 </p></blockquote>
13907
13908 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
13909
13910 <blockquote><p>
13911   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
13912   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
13913   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
13914   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
13915   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
13916   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
13917   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
13918   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
13919   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
13920   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
13921   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
13922   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
13923   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
13924   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
13925   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
13926   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
13927   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
13928   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
13929   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
13930   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
13931 </p></blockquote>
13932
13933 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13934
13935 <blockquote><p>
13936   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
13937   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
13938   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
13939   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
13940   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
13941   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
13942   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
13943   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
13944   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
13945   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
13946   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
13947   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
13948   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
13949   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
13950   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
13951   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
13952   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
13953   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
13954   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
13955   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
13956   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
13957 </p></blockquote>
13958
13959 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13960
13961 <blockquote><p>
13962   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
13963   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
13964   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
13965 </p></blockquote>
13966
13967 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
13968 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
13969 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
13970 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
13971 the difference somewhat.
13972
13973       </div>
13974       <div class="tags">
13975
13976
13977         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13978
13979
13980       </div>
13981     </div>
13982     <div class="padding"></div>
13983
13984     <div class="entry">
13985       <div class="title">
13986         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
13987       </div>
13988       <div class="date">
13989         28th June 2010
13990       </div>
13991       <div class="body">
13992         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
13993 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
13994 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
13995 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
13996 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
13997 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
13998 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
13999 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
14000 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
14001 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
14002
14003 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
14004 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
14005 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
14006 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
14007 released.</p>
14008
14009 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
14010 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
14011 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
14012 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
14013
14014 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
14015 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14016
14017 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
14018 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
14019 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
14020 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
14021 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
14022
14023       </div>
14024       <div class="tags">
14025
14026
14027         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14028
14029
14030       </div>
14031     </div>
14032     <div class="padding"></div>
14033
14034     <div class="entry">
14035       <div class="title">
14036         <a href="https://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>
14037       </div>
14038       <div class="date">
14039         24th June 2010
14040       </div>
14041       <div class="body">
14042         <p>A while back, I
14043 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
14044 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
14045 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
14046 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
14047
14048 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
14049 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
14050 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
14051 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
14052
14053 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
14054 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
14055 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
14056 Debian Edu.</p>
14057
14058 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
14059 the
14060 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
14061 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
14062 available today from IETF.</p>
14063
14064 <pre>
14065 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
14066 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
14067 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
14068  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
14069         NAME 'dhcpHost'
14070         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
14071 -       SUP top
14072 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
14073         MUST cn
14074         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
14075         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
14076 </pre>
14077
14078 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
14079 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
14080 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
14081
14082 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
14083 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14084
14085       </div>
14086       <div class="tags">
14087
14088
14089         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14090
14091
14092       </div>
14093     </div>
14094     <div class="padding"></div>
14095
14096     <div class="entry">
14097       <div class="title">
14098         <a href="https://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>
14099       </div>
14100       <div class="date">
14101         16th June 2010
14102       </div>
14103       <div class="body">
14104         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
14105 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
14106 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
14107 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
14108 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
14109 this:
14110
14111 <blockquote><pre>
14112 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
14113 tasksel --new-install
14114 </pre></blockquote>
14115
14116 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
14117 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
14118 any output what so ever.
14119
14120 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
14121 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
14122 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
14123 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
14124 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
14125 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
14126 code like this:
14127
14128 <blockquote><pre>
14129 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
14130 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
14131 $cmd
14132 </pre></blockquote>
14133
14134 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
14135 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
14136 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
14137 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
14138 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
14139 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
14140 installation.</p>
14141
14142 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
14143 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
14144 like this.</p>
14145
14146       </div>
14147       <div class="tags">
14148
14149
14150         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14151
14152
14153       </div>
14154     </div>
14155     <div class="padding"></div>
14156
14157     <div class="entry">
14158       <div class="title">
14159         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
14160       </div>
14161       <div class="date">
14162         13th June 2010
14163       </div>
14164       <div class="body">
14165         <p>My
14166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
14167 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
14168 finally made the upgrade logs available from
14169 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
14170 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
14171 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
14172 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
14173
14174 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
14175 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
14176 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
14177 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
14178 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
14179 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
14180 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
14181 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
14182
14183 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
14184 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
14185 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
14186 too surprising.</p>
14187
14188 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
14189 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
14190 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
14191 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
14192 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
14193 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
14194 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
14195 continue.</p>
14196
14197 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
14198 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
14199   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
14200   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
14201   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
14202   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
14203   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
14204   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
14205   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
14206   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
14207   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
14208   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
14209   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
14210   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
14211   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
14212   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14213   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
14214   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
14215   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
14216   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
14217   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
14218   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
14219   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
14220   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
14221   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
14222   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
14223   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
14224   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
14225   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
14226   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
14227
14228 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
14229
14230 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
14231   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
14232   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
14233   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
14234   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
14235   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
14236   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
14237   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
14238   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
14239   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
14240   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
14241   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
14242   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
14243   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
14244   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
14245   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
14246   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
14247   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
14248   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
14249   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
14250   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
14251   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
14252   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
14253   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
14254   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
14255   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
14256   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
14257   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
14258   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
14259   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14260   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
14261   zip</p>
14262
14263 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
14264
14265 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
14266   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
14267   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
14268   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
14269   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
14270   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
14271   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
14272   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
14273   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
14274   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
14275   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
14276   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
14277   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
14278   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
14279   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14280   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
14281   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
14282   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
14283   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
14284   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
14285   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
14286   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
14287   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
14288   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
14289   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
14290   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
14291   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
14292   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
14293
14294 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
14295 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
14296   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
14297   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
14298   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
14299   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
14300   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
14301   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
14302   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
14303   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
14304   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
14305   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
14306   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
14307   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
14308   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
14309   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
14310   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
14311   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
14312   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
14313   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
14314   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
14315   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
14316   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
14317   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
14318   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
14319   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
14320   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
14321   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
14322   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
14323   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
14324   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
14325   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
14326   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
14327   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
14328   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
14329   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14330   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
14331   xulrunner-1.9</p>
14332
14333
14334       </div>
14335       <div class="tags">
14336
14337
14338         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14339
14340
14341       </div>
14342     </div>
14343     <div class="padding"></div>
14344
14345     <div class="entry">
14346       <div class="title">
14347         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
14348       </div>
14349       <div class="date">
14350         11th June 2010
14351       </div>
14352       <div class="body">
14353         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
14354 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
14355 have been discovered and reported in the process
14356 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
14357 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
14358 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
14359 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
14360 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
14361
14362 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
14363 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
14364 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
14365 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
14366 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
14367 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
14368
14369 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
14370 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
14371 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
14372 is created.  The bug report
14373 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
14374 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
14375 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
14376 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
14377 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
14378 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
14379 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
14380 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
14381 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
14382 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
14383 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
14384 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
14385 Debian Squeeze.</p>
14386
14387 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
14388 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
14389 trick:</p>
14390
14391 <blockquote><pre>
14392 #!/bin/sh
14393 set -ex
14394
14395 if [ "$1" ] ; then
14396     desktop=$1
14397 else
14398     desktop=gnome
14399 fi
14400
14401 from=lenny
14402 to=squeeze
14403
14404 exec &lt; /dev/null
14405 unset LANG
14406 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
14407 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
14408 fuser -mv .
14409 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
14410 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
14411 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
14412 #!/bin/sh
14413 exit 101
14414 EOF
14415 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
14416 exit_cleanup() {
14417     umount $tmpdir/proc
14418 }
14419 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
14420 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
14421 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
14422
14423 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
14424
14425 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
14426 # to return the correct answers.
14427 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
14428     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
14429
14430 # Include the desktop and laptop task
14431 for test in desktop laptop ; do
14432     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
14433 #!/bin/sh
14434 exit 2
14435 EOF
14436     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
14437 done
14438
14439 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
14440 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
14441 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
14442 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
14443
14444 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
14445 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
14446 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
14447 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
14448 fuser -mv
14449 </pre></blockquote>
14450
14451 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
14452 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
14453 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
14454 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
14455 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
14456 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
14457
14458 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
14459 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
14460 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
14461 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
14462 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
14463 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
14464 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
14465
14466 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
14467 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
14468 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
14469 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
14470 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
14471 packages.</p>
14472
14473       </div>
14474       <div class="tags">
14475
14476
14477         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14478
14479
14480       </div>
14481     </div>
14482     <div class="padding"></div>
14483
14484     <div class="entry">
14485       <div class="title">
14486         <a href="https://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>
14487       </div>
14488       <div class="date">
14489          6th June 2010
14490       </div>
14491       <div class="body">
14492         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
14493 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
14494 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
14495 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
14496 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
14497 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
14498 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
14499
14500 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
14501 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
14502 COLUMNS):</p>
14503
14504 <blockquote><pre>
14505 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
14506 previous=N
14507 PREVLEVEL=
14508 RUNLEVEL=
14509 runlevel=S
14510 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
14511 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
14512 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
14513 </pre></blockquote>
14514
14515 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
14516 script.</p>
14517
14518 <blockquote><pre>
14519 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
14520 previous=N
14521 PREVLEVEL=N
14522 RUNLEVEL=S
14523 runlevel=S
14524 </pre></blockquote>
14525
14526 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
14527 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
14528 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
14529
14530 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
14531 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
14532 choice.</p>
14533
14534       </div>
14535       <div class="tags">
14536
14537
14538         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14539
14540
14541       </div>
14542     </div>
14543     <div class="padding"></div>
14544
14545     <div class="entry">
14546       <div class="title">
14547         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
14548       </div>
14549       <div class="date">
14550          6th June 2010
14551       </div>
14552       <div class="body">
14553         <p>Via the
14554 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
14555 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
14556 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
14557 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
14558 following the standards wars of today.</p>
14559
14560       </div>
14561       <div class="tags">
14562
14563
14564         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
14565
14566
14567       </div>
14568     </div>
14569     <div class="padding"></div>
14570
14571     <div class="entry">
14572       <div class="title">
14573         <a href="https://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>
14574       </div>
14575       <div class="date">
14576          3rd June 2010
14577       </div>
14578       <div class="body">
14579         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
14580 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
14581 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
14582 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
14583 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
14584
14585 <blockquote><pre>
14586 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
14587   vendor                    count
14588   Dell Computer Corporation     1
14589     PowerEdge 1750              1
14590   IBM                           1
14591     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
14592   Intel                         2
14593   [no-dmi-info]                 3
14594 maintainer:~#
14595 </pre></blockquote>
14596
14597 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
14598 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
14599 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
14600 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
14601 option to list the individual machines.</p>
14602
14603 <p>A larger list is
14604 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
14605 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
14606 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
14607 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
14608 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
14609 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
14610 collector.</p>
14611
14612       </div>
14613       <div class="tags">
14614
14615
14616         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
14617
14618
14619       </div>
14620     </div>
14621     <div class="padding"></div>
14622
14623     <div class="entry">
14624       <div class="title">
14625         <a href="https://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>
14626       </div>
14627       <div class="date">
14628          1st June 2010
14629       </div>
14630       <div class="body">
14631         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
14632 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
14633 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
14634 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
14635 wait.</p>
14636
14637 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
14638 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
14639 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
14640 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
14641 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
14642 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
14643
14644 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
14645 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
14646 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
14647 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
14648 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
14649 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
14650 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
14651 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
14652
14653 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
14654
14655       </div>
14656       <div class="tags">
14657
14658
14659         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14660
14661
14662       </div>
14663     </div>
14664     <div class="padding"></div>
14665
14666     <div class="entry">
14667       <div class="title">
14668         <a href="https://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>
14669       </div>
14670       <div class="date">
14671         27th May 2010
14672       </div>
14673       <div class="body">
14674         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
14675 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
14676 issues are known and should be solved:
14677
14678 <p><ul>
14679
14680 <li>The wicd package seen to
14681 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
14682 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
14683 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
14684 seem to be on the case.</li>
14685
14686 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
14687 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
14688 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
14689 maintainer is on the case.</li>
14690
14691 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
14692 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
14693 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
14694 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
14695 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
14696 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
14697 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
14698 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
14699
14700 </ul></p>
14701
14702 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
14703 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
14704 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
14705 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
14706
14707 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
14708 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
14709 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
14710 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
14711
14712 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
14713
14714       </div>
14715       <div class="tags">
14716
14717
14718         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14719
14720
14721       </div>
14722     </div>
14723     <div class="padding"></div>
14724
14725     <div class="entry">
14726       <div class="title">
14727         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
14728       </div>
14729       <div class="date">
14730         22nd May 2010
14731       </div>
14732       <div class="body">
14733         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
14734 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
14735 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
14736 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
14737
14738 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
14739 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
14740 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
14741 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
14742 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
14743 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
14744 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
14745 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
14746 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
14747 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
14748 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
14749 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
14750 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
14751 going to work.</p>
14752
14753 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
14754 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
14755 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
14756 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
14757 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
14758 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
14759 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
14760 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
14761 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
14762 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
14763 Edu.</p>
14764
14765 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
14766 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
14767 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
14768 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
14769 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
14770 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
14771
14772 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
14773 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
14774
14775       </div>
14776       <div class="tags">
14777
14778
14779         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14780
14781
14782       </div>
14783     </div>
14784     <div class="padding"></div>
14785
14786     <div class="entry">
14787       <div class="title">
14788         <a href="https://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>
14789       </div>
14790       <div class="date">
14791         14th May 2010
14792       </div>
14793       <div class="body">
14794         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
14795 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
14796 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
14797 expected, if I am to believe the
14798 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
14799 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
14800 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
14801 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
14802 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
14803 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
14804 version.</p>
14805
14806 More information about
14807 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
14808 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
14809 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
14810 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
14811
14812 <blockquote><pre>
14813 CONCURRENCY=none
14814 </pre></blockquote>
14815
14816 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
14817 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
14818 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
14819 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
14820
14821       </div>
14822       <div class="tags">
14823
14824
14825         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14826
14827
14828       </div>
14829     </div>
14830     <div class="padding"></div>
14831
14832     <div class="entry">
14833       <div class="title">
14834         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
14835       </div>
14836       <div class="date">
14837         14th May 2010
14838       </div>
14839       <div class="body">
14840         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
14841 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
14842 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
14843 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
14844 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
14845 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
14846 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
14847 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
14848
14849 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
14850 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
14851 this on the collector host:</p>
14852
14853 <blockquote><pre>
14854 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
14855 </pre></blockquote>
14856
14857 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
14858 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
14859
14860 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
14861 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
14862 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
14863 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
14864 written yet.</p>
14865
14866       </div>
14867       <div class="tags">
14868
14869
14870         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
14871
14872
14873       </div>
14874     </div>
14875     <div class="padding"></div>
14876
14877     <div class="entry">
14878       <div class="title">
14879         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
14880       </div>
14881       <div class="date">
14882         13th May 2010
14883       </div>
14884       <div class="body">
14885         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
14886 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
14887 has been
14888 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
14889
14890 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
14891 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
14892 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
14893 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
14894 based boot system.  Tollef is
14895 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
14896 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
14897 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
14898 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
14899 at the moment do not.</p>
14900
14901 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
14902 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
14903 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
14904 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
14905 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
14906 way forward.</p>
14907
14908 <p>In the mean time, based on the
14909 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
14910 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
14911 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
14912 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
14913 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
14914 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
14915 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
14916 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
14917
14918       </div>
14919       <div class="tags">
14920
14921
14922         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14923
14924
14925       </div>
14926     </div>
14927     <div class="padding"></div>
14928
14929     <div class="entry">
14930       <div class="title">
14931         <a href="https://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>
14932       </div>
14933       <div class="date">
14934          6th May 2010
14935       </div>
14936       <div class="body">
14937         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
14938 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
14939 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
14940 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
14941 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
14942 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
14943 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
14944
14945 <blockquote><pre>
14946 CONCURRENCY=makefile
14947 </pre></blockquote>
14948
14949 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
14950 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
14951 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
14952 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
14953 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
14954 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
14955 make this happen.</p>
14956
14957 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
14958 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
14959 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
14960 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
14961 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
14962
14963 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
14964 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
14965 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
14966 fix the remaining issues.</p>
14967
14968 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
14969 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
14970 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
14971 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
14972
14973       </div>
14974       <div class="tags">
14975
14976
14977         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14978
14979
14980       </div>
14981     </div>
14982     <div class="padding"></div>
14983
14984     <div class="entry">
14985       <div class="title">
14986         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
14987       </div>
14988       <div class="date">
14989         27th July 2009
14990       </div>
14991       <div class="body">
14992         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
14993 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
14994 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
14995 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
14996 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
14997 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
14998 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
14999
15000 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
15001 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
15002 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
15003
15004       </div>
15005       <div class="tags">
15006
15007
15008         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15009
15010
15011       </div>
15012     </div>
15013     <div class="padding"></div>
15014
15015     <div class="entry">
15016       <div class="title">
15017         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
15018       </div>
15019       <div class="date">
15020         22nd July 2009
15021       </div>
15022       <div class="body">
15023         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
15024 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
15025 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
15026 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
15027 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
15028 the package up to date.</p>
15029
15030 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
15031 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
15032 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
15033 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
15034 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
15035 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
15036 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
15037 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
15038 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
15039 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
15040 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
15041 working on the future release.</p>
15042
15043 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
15044 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
15045
15046       </div>
15047       <div class="tags">
15048
15049
15050         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15051
15052
15053       </div>
15054     </div>
15055     <div class="padding"></div>
15056
15057     <div class="entry">
15058       <div class="title">
15059         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
15060       </div>
15061       <div class="date">
15062         24th June 2009
15063       </div>
15064       <div class="body">
15065         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
15066 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
15067 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
15068 funded
15069 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
15070 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
15071 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
15072 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
15073 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
15074 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
15075
15076 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
15077 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
15078 boot:</p>
15079
15080 <ul>
15081
15082 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
15083
15084 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
15085    clock is in UTC.</li>
15086
15087 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
15088    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
15089    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
15090
15091 </ul>
15092
15093 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
15094 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
15095 Villegas</a>.
15096
15097 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
15098 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
15099 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
15100 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
15101 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
15102 using this.</p>
15103
15104 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
15105 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
15106 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
15107 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
15108 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
15109 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
15110 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
15111
15112       </div>
15113       <div class="tags">
15114
15115
15116         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15117
15118
15119       </div>
15120     </div>
15121     <div class="padding"></div>
15122
15123     <div class="entry">
15124       <div class="title">
15125         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
15126       </div>
15127       <div class="date">
15128         17th May 2009
15129       </div>
15130       <div class="body">
15131         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
15132 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
15133 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
15134 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
15135 dager siden kom
15136 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
15137 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
15138 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
15139 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
15140 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
15141
15142 <blockquote>
15143 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
15144 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
15145 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
15146 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
15147 </blockquote>
15148
15149 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
15150 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
15151 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
15152 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
15153 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
15154
15155 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
15156 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
15157 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
15158
15159       </div>
15160       <div class="tags">
15161
15162
15163         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
15164
15165
15166       </div>
15167     </div>
15168     <div class="padding"></div>
15169
15170     <div class="entry">
15171       <div class="title">
15172         <a href="https://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>
15173       </div>
15174       <div class="date">
15175          7th May 2009
15176       </div>
15177       <div class="body">
15178         <p>Kom over
15179 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
15180 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
15181 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
15182 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
15183 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
15184 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
15185 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
15186
15187       </div>
15188       <div class="tags">
15189
15190
15191         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15192
15193
15194       </div>
15195     </div>
15196     <div class="padding"></div>
15197
15198     <div class="entry">
15199       <div class="title">
15200         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
15201       </div>
15202       <div class="date">
15203          2nd May 2009
15204       </div>
15205       <div class="body">
15206         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
15207 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
15208 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
15209 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
15210 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
15211 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
15212 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
15213 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
15214 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
15215 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
15216 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
15217 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
15218 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
15219 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
15220 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
15221 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
15222 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
15223 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
15224 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
15225 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
15226
15227 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
15228 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
15229 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
15230 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
15231 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
15232 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
15233 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
15234 betydelige.</p>
15235
15236       </div>
15237       <div class="tags">
15238
15239
15240         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
15241
15242
15243       </div>
15244     </div>
15245     <div class="padding"></div>
15246
15247     <div class="entry">
15248       <div class="title">
15249         <a href="https://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>
15250       </div>
15251       <div class="date">
15252          2nd May 2009
15253       </div>
15254       <div class="body">
15255         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
15256 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
15257 do not yet know them.</p>
15258
15259 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
15260 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
15261 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
15262 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
15263 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
15264 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
15265 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
15266 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
15267 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
15268 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
15269 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
15270
15271 <p>The second one is
15272 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
15273 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
15274 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
15275 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
15276 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
15277 and the company behind it is running
15278 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
15279 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
15280 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
15281 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
15282 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
15283 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
15284 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
15285 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
15286
15287 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
15288 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
15289 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
15290 surrounded by today.</p>
15291
15292       </div>
15293       <div class="tags">
15294
15295
15296         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15297
15298
15299       </div>
15300     </div>
15301     <div class="padding"></div>
15302
15303     <div class="entry">
15304       <div class="title">
15305         <a href="https://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>
15306       </div>
15307       <div class="date">
15308         28th April 2009
15309       </div>
15310       <div class="body">
15311         <p>Julien Blache
15312 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
15313 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
15314 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
15315 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
15316 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
15317 properties.</p>
15318
15319       </div>
15320       <div class="tags">
15321
15322
15323         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15324
15325
15326       </div>
15327     </div>
15328     <div class="padding"></div>
15329
15330     <div class="entry">
15331       <div class="title">
15332         <a href="https://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>
15333       </div>
15334       <div class="date">
15335         30th March 2009
15336       </div>
15337       <div class="body">
15338         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
15339 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
15340 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
15341 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
15342 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
15343 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
15344 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
15345 application.</p>
15346
15347 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
15348 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
15349 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
15350 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
15351 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
15352 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
15353 blocked from doing so.</p>
15354
15355 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
15356 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
15357 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
15358 requirements change.</p>
15359
15360 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
15361 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
15362 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
15363
15364       </div>
15365       <div class="tags">
15366
15367
15368         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
15369
15370
15371       </div>
15372     </div>
15373     <div class="padding"></div>
15374
15375     <div class="entry">
15376       <div class="title">
15377         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
15378       </div>
15379       <div class="date">
15380         29th March 2009
15381       </div>
15382       <div class="body">
15383         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
15384 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
15385 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
15386 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
15387 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
15388 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
15389 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
15390 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
15391 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
15392 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
15393 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
15394 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
15395 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
15396 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
15397 now. :)</p>
15398
15399       </div>
15400       <div class="tags">
15401
15402
15403         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15404
15405
15406       </div>
15407     </div>
15408     <div class="padding"></div>
15409
15410     <div class="entry">
15411       <div class="title">
15412         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
15413       </div>
15414       <div class="date">
15415         29th March 2009
15416       </div>
15417       <div class="body">
15418         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
15419 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
15420 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
15421 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
15422 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
15423 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
15424
15425 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
15426 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
15427 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
15428 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
15429 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
15430 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
15431 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
15432 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
15433 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
15434 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
15435 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
15436 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
15437 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
15438
15439 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
15440 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
15441 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
15442 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
15443
15444 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
15445 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
15446
15447 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
15448 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
15449 new IETF work group?</p>
15450
15451       </div>
15452       <div class="tags">
15453
15454
15455         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15456
15457
15458       </div>
15459     </div>
15460     <div class="padding"></div>
15461
15462     <div class="entry">
15463       <div class="title">
15464         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
15465       </div>
15466       <div class="date">
15467         15th February 2009
15468       </div>
15469       <div class="body">
15470         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
15471 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
15472 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
15473 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
15474 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
15475 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
15476 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
15477 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
15478 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
15479 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
15480 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
15481 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
15482
15483       </div>
15484       <div class="tags">
15485
15486
15487         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
15488
15489
15490       </div>
15491     </div>
15492     <div class="padding"></div>
15493
15494     <div class="entry">
15495       <div class="title">
15496         <a href="https://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>
15497       </div>
15498       <div class="date">
15499          7th December 2008
15500       </div>
15501       <div class="body">
15502         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
15503 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
15504 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
15505 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
15506 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
15507 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
15508 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
15509 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
15510
15511 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
15512 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
15513 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
15514 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
15515 of these cards.</p>
15516
15517       </div>
15518       <div class="tags">
15519
15520
15521         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
15522
15523
15524       </div>
15525     </div>
15526     <div class="padding"></div>
15527
15528     <div class="entry">
15529       <div class="title">
15530         <a href="https://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>
15531       </div>
15532       <div class="date">
15533         25th November 2008
15534       </div>
15535       <div class="body">
15536         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
15537 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
15538 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
15539 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
15540 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
15541 notes are available on
15542 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
15543 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
15544 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
15545 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
15546 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
15547 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
15548 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
15549 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
15550 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
15551
15552 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
15553 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
15554
15555       </div>
15556       <div class="tags">
15557
15558
15559         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
15560
15561
15562       </div>
15563     </div>
15564     <div class="padding"></div>
15565
15566     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
15567     <div id="sidebar">
15568
15569
15570
15571 <h2>Archive</h2>
15572 <ul>
15573
15574 <li>2023
15575 <ul>
15576
15577 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/01/">January (3)</a></li>
15578
15579 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15580
15581 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15582
15583 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/05/">May (2)</a></li>
15584
15585 </ul></li>
15586
15587 <li>2022
15588 <ul>
15589
15590 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15591
15592 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15593
15594 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15595
15596 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15597
15598 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/07/">July (1)</a></li>
15599
15600 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15601
15602 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/10/">October (1)</a></li>
15603
15604 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/12/">December (1)</a></li>
15605
15606 </ul></li>
15607
15608 <li>2021
15609 <ul>
15610
15611 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/01/">January (2)</a></li>
15612
15613 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15614
15615 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/05/">May (1)</a></li>
15616
15617 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/06/">June (1)</a></li>
15618
15619 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/07/">July (3)</a></li>
15620
15621 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/08/">August (1)</a></li>
15622
15623 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15624
15625 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/10/">October (1)</a></li>
15626
15627 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/12/">December (1)</a></li>
15628
15629 </ul></li>
15630
15631 <li>2020
15632 <ul>
15633
15634 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/02/">February (2)</a></li>
15635
15636 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/03/">March (2)</a></li>
15637
15638 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15639
15640 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/05/">May (3)</a></li>
15641
15642 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15643
15644 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/07/">July (1)</a></li>
15645
15646 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15647
15648 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/10/">October (1)</a></li>
15649
15650 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/11/">November (1)</a></li>
15651
15652 </ul></li>
15653
15654 <li>2019
15655 <ul>
15656
15657 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/01/">January (4)</a></li>
15658
15659 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/02/">February (3)</a></li>
15660
15661 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15662
15663 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/05/">May (2)</a></li>
15664
15665 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/06/">June (5)</a></li>
15666
15667 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/07/">July (2)</a></li>
15668
15669 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/08/">August (1)</a></li>
15670
15671 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15672
15673 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/11/">November (1)</a></li>
15674
15675 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/12/">December (4)</a></li>
15676
15677 </ul></li>
15678
15679 <li>2018
15680 <ul>
15681
15682 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
15683
15684 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
15685
15686 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
15687
15688 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
15689
15690 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15691
15692 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
15693
15694 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (3)</a></li>
15695
15696 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/09/">September (3)</a></li>
15697
15698 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/10/">October (5)</a></li>
15699
15700 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/11/">November (2)</a></li>
15701
15702 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/12/">December (4)</a></li>
15703
15704 </ul></li>
15705
15706 <li>2017
15707 <ul>
15708
15709 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
15710
15711 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
15712
15713 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
15714
15715 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15716
15717 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
15718
15719 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
15720
15721 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
15722
15723 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
15724
15725 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
15726
15727 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15728
15729 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
15730
15731 </ul></li>
15732
15733 <li>2016
15734 <ul>
15735
15736 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
15737
15738 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
15739
15740 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15741
15742 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
15743
15744 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
15745
15746 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15747
15748 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
15749
15750 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
15751
15752 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
15753
15754 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
15755
15756 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
15757
15758 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
15759
15760 </ul></li>
15761
15762 <li>2015
15763 <ul>
15764
15765 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
15766
15767 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
15768
15769 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
15770
15771 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
15772
15773 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
15774
15775 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
15776
15777 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
15778
15779 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
15780
15781 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
15782
15783 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
15784
15785 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
15786
15787 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
15788
15789 </ul></li>
15790
15791 <li>2014
15792 <ul>
15793
15794 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
15795
15796 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
15797
15798 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
15799
15800 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
15801
15802 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
15803
15804 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15805
15806 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
15807
15808 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
15809
15810 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
15811
15812 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
15813
15814 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15815
15816 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
15817
15818 </ul></li>
15819
15820 <li>2013
15821 <ul>
15822
15823 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
15824
15825 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
15826
15827 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
15828
15829 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
15830
15831 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
15832
15833 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
15834
15835 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
15836
15837 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
15838
15839 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
15840
15841 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
15842
15843 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
15844
15845 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
15846
15847 </ul></li>
15848
15849 <li>2012
15850 <ul>
15851
15852 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
15853
15854 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
15855
15856 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
15857
15858 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
15859
15860 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
15861
15862 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
15863
15864 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
15865
15866 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
15867
15868 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
15869
15870 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
15871
15872 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
15873
15874 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
15875
15876 </ul></li>
15877
15878 <li>2011
15879 <ul>
15880
15881 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
15882
15883 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
15884
15885 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
15886
15887 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
15888
15889 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
15890
15891 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15892
15893 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
15894
15895 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
15896
15897 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
15898
15899 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
15900
15901 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15902
15903 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
15904
15905 </ul></li>
15906
15907 <li>2010
15908 <ul>
15909
15910 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
15911
15912 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15913
15914 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15915
15916 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
15917
15918 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
15919
15920 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
15921
15922 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
15923
15924 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
15925
15926 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
15927
15928 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
15929
15930 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
15931
15932 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
15933
15934 </ul></li>
15935
15936 <li>2009
15937 <ul>
15938
15939 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
15940
15941 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
15942
15943 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
15944
15945 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
15946
15947 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
15948
15949 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
15950
15951 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
15952
15953 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
15954
15955 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15956
15957 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
15958
15959 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15960
15961 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
15962
15963 </ul></li>
15964
15965 <li>2008
15966 <ul>
15967
15968 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
15969
15970 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
15971
15972 </ul></li>
15973
15974 </ul>
15975
15976
15977
15978 <h2>Tags</h2>
15979 <ul>
15980
15981  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (19)</a></li>
15982
15983  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
15984
15985  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
15986
15987  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
15988
15989  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/betalkontant">betalkontant (9)</a></li>
15990
15991  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (12)</a></li>
15992
15993  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
15994
15995  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
15996
15997  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
15998
15999  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (192)</a></li>
16000
16001  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (159)</a></li>
16002
16003  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (9)</a></li>
16004
16005  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (11)</a></li>
16006
16007  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (18)</a></li>
16008
16009  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (30)</a></li>
16010
16011  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
16012
16013  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (448)</a></li>
16014
16015  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
16016
16017  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (14)</a></li>
16018
16019  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (34)</a></li>
16020
16021  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
16022
16023  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (20)</a></li>
16024
16025  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
16026
16027  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (43)</a></li>
16028
16029  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
16030
16031  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (23)</a></li>
16032
16033  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi (4)</a></li>
16034
16035  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
16036
16037  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (5)</a></li>
16038
16039  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
16040
16041  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc (5)</a></li>
16042
16043  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
16044
16045  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
16046
16047  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/madewithcc">madewithcc (3)</a></li>
16048
16049  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
16050
16051  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (45)</a></li>
16052
16053  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (14)</a></li>
16054
16055  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5 (23)</a></li>
16056
16057  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (320)</a></li>
16058
16059  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (198)</a></li>
16060
16061  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (40)</a></li>
16062
16063  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
16064
16065  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch (3)</a></li>
16066
16067  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (75)</a></li>
16068
16069  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (114)</a></li>
16070
16071  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
16072
16073  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
16074
16075  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
16076
16077  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
16078
16079  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (17)</a></li>
16080
16081  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
16082
16083  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (7)</a></li>
16084
16085  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
16086
16087  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (59)</a></li>
16088
16089  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
16090
16091  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
16092
16093  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (74)</a></li>
16094
16095  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (7)</a></li>
16096
16097  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (14)</a></li>
16098
16099  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (64)</a></li>
16100
16101  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (5)</a></li>
16102
16103  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
16104
16105  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
16106
16107  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (20)</a></li>
16108
16109  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (78)</a></li>
16110
16111  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
16112
16113  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (42)</a></li>
16114
16115 </ul>
16116
16117
16118     </div>
16119     <p style="text-align: right">
16120  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
16121 </p>
16122
16123   </body>
16124 </html>