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6 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</title>
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14 <h1>
15 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
16
17 </h1>
18
19 </div>
20
21
22 <div class="entry">
23 <div class="title">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</div>
24 <div class="date"> 9th January 2013</div>
25 <div class="body"><p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
26 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
27 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
28 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
29 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
30 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
31 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
32 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
33 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
34 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
35 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
36
37 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
38 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
39 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>. The idea is fairly
40 simple:
41
42 <ul>
43
44 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
45 starting when a user log in.</li>
46
47 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
48 hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
49
50 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
51 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
52 packages.</li>
53
54 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
55 package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
56
57 </ul>
58
59 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
60 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
61 discover database to find packages and
62 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
63 packages.</p>
64
65 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
66 draft package is now checked into
67 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
68 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>. In the process, I updated the
69 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
70 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
71 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
72 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
73 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
74 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
75 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
76 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
77 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
78 because of the freeze).</p>
79
80 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
81 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
82 inserted):</p>
83
84 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
85
86 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
87 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
88 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
89
90 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
91 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
92 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
93 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
94 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
95 reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
96 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
97
98 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
99 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
100 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
101 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
102 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
103 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
104 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
105 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
106 not be installed?</p>
107
108 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
109 please send me an email. :)</p>
110 </div>
111
112 <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.</div>
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473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
474
475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
476
477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (59)</a></li>
478
479 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
480
481 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (38)</a></li>
482
483 </ul>
484
485
486 </div>
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