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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://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="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          2nd September 2018
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
  32 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
  33 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard.  After searching the
  34 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
  35 to find a recipe that worked.  If you got a kodi instance with its API
  36 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
  37 have check out a nice cover band.</p>
  38
  39 <p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  40   --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
  41   "params": {"item": { "file":
  42   "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
  43   http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
  44
  45 <p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
  46 first argument.  It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
  47 and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi.  It is almost like a
  48 Chromecast. :)</p>
  49
  50 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  51 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  52 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  53
  54       </div>
  55       <div class="tags">
  56
  57
  58         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
  59
  60
  61       </div>
  62     </div>
  63     <div class="padding"></div>
  64
  65     <div class="entry">
  66       <div class="title">
  67         <a href="http://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>
  68       </div>
  69       <div class="date">
  70         31st July 2018
  71       </div>
  72       <div class="body">
  73         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
  74 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
  75 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
  76 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
  77 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
  78 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
  79 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
  80 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
  81 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
  82 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
  83 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
  84 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
  85 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
  86
  87 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
  88 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
  89 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
  90 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
  91 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
  92 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
  93 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
  94 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
  95 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
  96 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
  97 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
  98 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
  99 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
 100
 101 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
 102 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
 103 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
 104 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
 105 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
 106 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
 107 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
 108 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
 109 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
 110 seem to have the support I need.</p>
 111
 112 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
 113 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
 114 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
 115 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
 116
 117 <blockquote><pre>
 118 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
 119   -description='The RSS image description.' \
 120   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
 121 </pre></blockquote>
 122
 123 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
 124 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
 125 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
 126 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
 127 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
 128
 129 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
 130 suggestions.</p>
 131
 132 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 133 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 134 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 135
 136       </div>
 137       <div class="tags">
 138
 139
 140         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>.
 141
 142
 143       </div>
 144     </div>
 145     <div class="padding"></div>
 146
 147     <div class="entry">
 148       <div class="title">
 149         <a href="http://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>
 150       </div>
 151       <div class="date">
 152         12th July 2018
 153       </div>
 154       <div class="body">
 155         <p>Last night, I wrote
 156 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
 157 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
 158 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
 159 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
 160 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
 161 care of it all.</p>
 162
 163 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
 164 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
 165 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
 166 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
 167 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
 168 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
 169 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
 170 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
 171 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
 172 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
 173 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
 174 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
 175 I only care about the picture part.</p>
 176
 177 <blockquote><pre>
 178 #!/bin/sh
 179 #
 180 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
 181 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
 182 # for backgorund information.
 183
 184 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
 185 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
 186 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
 187 kodicmd() {
 188     host="$1"
 189     cmd="$2"
 190     params="$3"
 191     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 192          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
 193          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
 194 }
 195 cleanup() {
 196     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
 197         # Stop the playing when we end
 198         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
 199                             jq .result[].playerid)
 200         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
 201     fi
 202     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
 203         kill "$gstpid"
 204     fi
 205 }
 206 trap cleanup EXIT INT
 207
 208 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
 209     kodihost=$1
 210     shift
 211 else
 212     kodihost=kodi.local
 213 fi
 214
 215 mcast=239.255.0.1
 216 mcastport=1234
 217 mcastttl=1
 218
 219 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
 220   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
 221 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
 222   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
 223   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
 224   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
 225   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
 226   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
 227   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
 228   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
 229 gstpid=$!
 230
 231 # Give stream a second to get going
 232 sleep 1
 233
 234 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
 235 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
 236         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
 237
 238 # wait for gst to end
 239 wait "$gstpid"
 240 </pre></blockquote>
 241
 242 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
 243
 244 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 245 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 246 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 247
 248       </div>
 249       <div class="tags">
 250
 251
 252         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 253
 254
 255       </div>
 256     </div>
 257     <div class="padding"></div>
 258
 259     <div class="entry">
 260       <div class="title">
 261         <a href="http://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>
 262       </div>
 263       <div class="date">
 264         12th July 2018
 265       </div>
 266       <div class="body">
 267         <p>PS: See
 268 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
 269 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
 270
 271 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
 272 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
 273 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
 274 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
 275 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
 276 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
 277
 278 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
 279 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
 280 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
 281 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
 282 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
 283 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
 284
 285 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
 286 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
 287 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
 288 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
 289 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
 290 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
 291
 292 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
 293 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
 294 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
 295 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
 296 the programs I work on.</p>
 297
 298 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
 299 rtp and rtsp recipes from
 300 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
 301 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
 302 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
 303
 304 <blockquote><pre>
 305 vlc screen:// --sout \
 306   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
 307 </pre></blockquote>
 308
 309 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
 310 same IP address:</p>
 311
 312 <blockquote><pre>
 313 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
 314   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 315 </pre></blockquote>
 316
 317 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
 318 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
 319 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
 320 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
 321 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
 322 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
 323 big screen. :)</p>
 324
 325 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
 326 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
 327 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
 328 enough to tell.</p>
 329
 330 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
 331 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
 332 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
 333 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
 334 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
 335 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
 336 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
 337 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
 338 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
 339 the source end
 340
 341 <blockquote><pre>
 342 cvlc screen:// --sout \
 343   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
 344 </pre></blockquote>
 345
 346 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
 347
 348 <blockquote><pre>
 349 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
 350   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 351 </pre></blockquote>
 352
 353 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
 354 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
 355 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
 356 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
 357 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
 358 difference.</p>
 359
 360 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
 361 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
 362 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
 363 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
 364 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
 365 multicast address on port 1234:
 366
 367 <blockquote><pre>
 368 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
 369   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
 370   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
 371   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
 372   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
 373   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
 374   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
 375     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
 376   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
 377 </pre></blockquote>
 378
 379 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
 380
 381 <blockquote><pre>
 382 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
 383   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 384 </pre></blockquote>
 385
 386 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
 387 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
 388 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
 389 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
 390 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
 391 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
 392 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
 393
 394 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
 395 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
 396 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
 397 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
 398
 399 <blockquote><pre>
 400 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
 401 </pre></blockquote>
 402
 403 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 404 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 405 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 406
 407       </div>
 408       <div class="tags">
 409
 410
 411         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/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 412
 413
 414       </div>
 415     </div>
 416     <div class="padding"></div>
 417
 418     <div class="entry">
 419       <div class="title">
 420         <a href="http://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>
 421       </div>
 422       <div class="date">
 423          9th July 2018
 424       </div>
 425       <div class="body">
 426         <p>Five years ago,
 427 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
 428 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
 429 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
 430 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
 431 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
 432 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
 433 unstable only this time:
 434
 435 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
 436
 437 <pre>
 438   count MIME type
 439   ----- -----------------------
 440      56 image/jpeg
 441      55 image/png
 442      49 image/tiff
 443      48 image/gif
 444      39 image/bmp
 445      38 text/plain
 446      37 audio/mpeg
 447      34 application/ogg
 448      33 audio/x-flac
 449      32 audio/x-mp3
 450      30 audio/x-wav
 451      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
 452      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
 453      27 inode/directory
 454      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
 455      27 audio/x-mpeg
 456      26 application/x-ogg
 457      25 audio/x-mpegurl
 458      25 audio/ogg
 459      24 text/html
 460 </pre>
 461
 462 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
 463 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
 464 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
 465
 466 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
 467 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
 468 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
 469 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
 470 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
 471 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
 472 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
 473 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
 474 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
 475 list like this:</p>
 476
 477 <p><blockquote><pre>
 478 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
 479 Package: anjuta
 480 Package: audacious
 481 Package: baobab
 482 Package: cervisia
 483 Package: chirp
 484 Package: dolphin
 485 Package: doublecmd-common
 486 Package: easytag
 487 Package: enlightenment
 488 Package: ephoto
 489 Package: filelight
 490 Package: gwenview
 491 Package: k4dirstat
 492 Package: kaffeine
 493 Package: kdesvn
 494 Package: kid3
 495 Package: kid3-qt
 496 Package: nautilus
 497 Package: nemo
 498 Package: pcmanfm
 499 Package: pcmanfm-qt
 500 Package: qweborf
 501 Package: ranger
 502 Package: sirikali
 503 Package: spacefm
 504 Package: spacefm
 505 Package: vifm
 506 %
 507 </pre></blockquote></p>
 508
 509 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
 510 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
 511
 512 <p><blockquote><pre>
 513 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
 514 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
 515 %
 516 </pre></blockquote></p>
 517
 518 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
 519 format:</p>
 520
 521 <p><blockquote><pre>
 522 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
 523 Package: cura
 524 Package: meshlab
 525 Package: printrun
 526 %
 527 </pre></blockquote></p>
 528
 529 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
 530
 531 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 532 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 533 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 534
 535       </div>
 536       <div class="tags">
 537
 538
 539         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>.
 540
 541
 542       </div>
 543     </div>
 544     <div class="padding"></div>
 545
 546     <div class="entry">
 547       <div class="title">
 548         <a href="http://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>
 549       </div>
 550       <div class="date">
 551          8th July 2018
 552       </div>
 553       <div class="body">
 554         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
 555 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
 556 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
 557 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
 558 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
 559 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
 560 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
 561 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
 562 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
 563 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
 564 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
 565
 566 <p><blockquote><pre>
 567 #!/bin/sh
 568 #
 569 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
 570 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
 571 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
 572 # flag for manual/automatic.
 573
 574 set -e
 575
 576 ignore() {
 577     if [ "$1" ]; then
 578         grep -v "$1"
 579     else
 580         cat
 581     fi
 582 }
 583
 584 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
 585     echo "Upgrading $p"
 586     apt clean
 587     apt install --download-only -y $p
 588     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
 589         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
 590             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
 591             break
 592         fi
 593     done
 594 done
 595 </pre></blockquote></p>
 596
 597 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
 598 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
 599 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
 600 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
 601 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
 602 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
 603 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
 604 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
 605 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
 606
 607 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
 608 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
 609 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
 610 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
 611 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
 612
 613 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
 614 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
 615 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
 616 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
 617 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
 618 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
 619 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
 620
 621 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 622 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 623 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 624
 625       </div>
 626       <div class="tags">
 627
 628
 629         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>.
 630
 631
 632       </div>
 633     </div>
 634     <div class="padding"></div>
 635
 636     <div class="entry">
 637       <div class="title">
 638         <a href="http://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>
 639       </div>
 640       <div class="date">
 641         13th February 2018
 642       </div>
 643       <div class="body">
 644         <p>A new version of the
 645 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
 646 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
 647 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
 648 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
 649 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
 650 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
 651 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
 652 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
 653 well.</p>
 654
 655 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
 656 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
 657 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
 658 in Debian.</p>
 659
 660 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 661 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 662 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 663
 664       </div>
 665       <div class="tags">
 666
 667
 668         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 669
 670
 671       </div>
 672     </div>
 673     <div class="padding"></div>
 674
 675     <div class="entry">
 676       <div class="title">
 677         <a href="http://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>
 678       </div>
 679       <div class="date">
 680         17th December 2017
 681       </div>
 682       <div class="body">
 683         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
 684 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
 685 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
 686 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
 687 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
 688 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
 689 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
 690 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
 691 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
 692 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
 693 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
 694 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
 695 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
 696
 697 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
 698 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
 699 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
 700 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
 701 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
 702
 703 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
 704 team, flocking together on the
 705 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
 706 mailing list and the
 707 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
 708 IRC channel.</p>
 709
 710 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
 711 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
 712 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
 713
 714       </div>
 715       <div class="tags">
 716
 717
 718         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 719
 720
 721       </div>
 722     </div>
 723     <div class="padding"></div>
 724
 725     <div class="entry">
 726       <div class="title">
 727         <a href="http://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>
 728       </div>
 729       <div class="date">
 730          9th October 2017
 731       </div>
 732       <div class="body">
 733         <p>At my nearby maker space,
 734 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
 735 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
 736 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
 737 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
 738 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
 739 as the software involved,
 740 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
 741 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
 742 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
 743 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
 744 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
 745 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
 746 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
 747
 748 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
 749 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
 750 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
 751 on
 752 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 753 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
 754
 755 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
 756 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
 757 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
 758 upstream version.</p>
 759
 760 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
 761 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
 762 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
 763 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
 764 Debian, check out
 765 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
 766 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
 767 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
 768
 769 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 770 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 771 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 772
 773       </div>
 774       <div class="tags">
 775
 776
 777         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 778
 779
 780       </div>
 781     </div>
 782     <div class="padding"></div>
 783
 784     <div class="entry">
 785       <div class="title">
 786         <a href="http://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>
 787       </div>
 788       <div class="date">
 789         29th September 2017
 790       </div>
 791       <div class="body">
 792         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
 793 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
 794 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
 795 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
 796 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
 797 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
 798 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
 799 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
 800 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
 801 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
 802 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
 803 listen.</p>
 804
 805 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
 806 visualizing this information up and running for
 807 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
 808 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
 809 library.  The solution is based on the
 810 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
 811 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
 812 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
 813 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
 814 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
 815 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
 816 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
 817 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
 818
 819 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
 820 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
 821 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
 822 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
 823 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
 824 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
 825 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
 826 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
 827
 828 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
 829 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
 830 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
 831 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
 832 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
 833 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
 834 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
 835 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
 836 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
 837 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
 838 mentioned in
 839 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
 840 issue for the topic</a>.
 841
 842 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
 843
 844       </div>
 845       <div class="tags">
 846
 847
 848         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 849
 850
 851       </div>
 852     </div>
 853     <div class="padding"></div>
 854
 855     <div class="entry">
 856       <div class="title">
 857         <a href="http://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>
 858       </div>
 859       <div class="date">
 860         24th September 2017
 861       </div>
 862       <div class="body">
 863         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
 864 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
 865 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
 866 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
 867 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
 868 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
 869 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
 870 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
 871 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
 872
 873 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
 874 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
 875 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
 876 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
 877
 878 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
 879 clone of two python scripts:</p>
 880
 881 <ol>
 882
 883 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
 884   testing).</li>
 885
 886 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
 887   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
 888
 889 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
 890   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
 891
 892 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
 893
 894 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 895   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
 896   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
 897
 898 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 899   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
 900
 901 </ol>
 902
 903 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
 904 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
 905 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
 906 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
 907 very cheaply
 908 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
 909 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
 910 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
 911
 912 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
 913 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
 914 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
 915 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
 916 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
 917 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
 918 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
 919 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
 920
 921 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
 922 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
 923 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
 924 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
 925 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
 926 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
 927 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
 928 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
 929 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
 930 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
 931 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
 932 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
 933
 934       </div>
 935       <div class="tags">
 936
 937
 938         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 939
 940
 941       </div>
 942     </div>
 943     <div class="padding"></div>
 944
 945     <div class="entry">
 946       <div class="title">
 947         <a href="http://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>
 948       </div>
 949       <div class="date">
 950          9th August 2017
 951       </div>
 952       <div class="body">
 953         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
 954 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
 955 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
 956 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
 957 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
 958 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
 959 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
 960
 961 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
 962 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
 963 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
 964 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
 965 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
 966 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
 967 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
 968 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
 969 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
 970 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
 971 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
 972 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
 973 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
 974
 975 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
 976 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
 977 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
 978 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
 979 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
 980 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
 981 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
 982 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
 983 collector for a few days now.</p>
 984
 985 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
 986
 987 <ol>
 988
 989 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
 990
 991 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
 992 <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>
 993
 994 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
 995
 996 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
 997 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
 998 found a GSM station).</li>
 999
1000 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
1001
1002 </ol>
1003
1004 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
1005 running, I decided to package
1006 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
1007 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
1008 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
1009 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
1010 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
1011
1012 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
1013 commercial tools like
1014 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
1015 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
1016 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
1017 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
1018 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
1019 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
1020 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
1021 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
1022 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
1023 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
1024 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
1025 of government officials...</p>
1026
1027 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
1028 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
1029 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
1030 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
1031 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
1032 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
1033 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
1034 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
1035 one frequency?</p>
1036
1037       </div>
1038       <div class="tags">
1039
1040
1041         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1042
1043
1044       </div>
1045     </div>
1046     <div class="padding"></div>
1047
1048     <div class="entry">
1049       <div class="title">
1050         <a href="http://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>
1051       </div>
1052       <div class="date">
1053         25th July 2017
1054       </div>
1055       <div class="body">
1056         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
1057
1058 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1059 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1060 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
1061 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
1062 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
1063 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
1064 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
1065 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
1066 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
1067 as a web page</a>.</p>
1068
1069 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
1070 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
1071 in
1072 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
1073 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
1074 and
1075 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
1076 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
1077 project.  I hope
1078 "<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
1079 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
1080
1081       </div>
1082       <div class="tags">
1083
1084
1085         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1086
1087
1088       </div>
1089     </div>
1090     <div class="padding"></div>
1091
1092     <div class="entry">
1093       <div class="title">
1094         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
1095       </div>
1096       <div class="date">
1097          3rd June 2017
1098       </div>
1099       <div class="body">
1100         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
1101 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
1102 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
1103 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
1104 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
1105 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
1106 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
1107
1108 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
1109
1110 <blockquote>
1111 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
1112 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
1113 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
1114
1115 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
1116 på temaet:</p>
1117 <ol>
1118 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
1119 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
1120 </ol>
1121
1122 </blockquote>
1123
1124 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
1125
1126 <blockquote>
1127 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
1128 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
1129 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
1130
1131 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
1132 temaet:</p>
1133
1134 <ol>
1135 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
1136 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
1137 </ol>
1138
1139 </blockquote>
1140
1141 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
1142 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
1143 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
1144 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
1145 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
1146 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
1147 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
1148
1149       </div>
1150       <div class="tags">
1151
1152
1153         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
1154
1155
1156       </div>
1157     </div>
1158     <div class="padding"></div>
1159
1160     <div class="entry">
1161       <div class="title">
1162         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
1163       </div>
1164       <div class="date">
1165          9th March 2017
1166       </div>
1167       <div class="body">
1168         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
1169 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
1170 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
1171 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
1172 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
1173 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
1174 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
1175 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
1176
1177 <p><blockquote>
1178 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
1179 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
1180 </blockquote></p>
1181
1182 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
1183 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
1184 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
1185 are noticed.</p>
1186
1187 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
1188 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
1189 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
1190 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
1191 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
1192 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
1193
1194 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
1195 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
1196 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
1197 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
1198 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
1199 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
1200
1201 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
1202
1203 <p><blockquote><pre>
1204 [...]
1205 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
1206 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
1207         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
1208         age:    7863311
1209         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
1210         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
1211         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
1212         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
1213         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
1214         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
1215         per-op statistics
1216                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1217              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
1218              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
1219               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
1220               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
1221             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
1222                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
1223                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
1224               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
1225                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
1226              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
1227                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
1228               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
1229                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
1230               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
1231                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
1232              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
1233          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
1234               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
1235               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
1236             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
1237               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1238
1239 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
1240 [...]
1241 </pre></blockquote></p>
1242
1243 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
1244 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
1245 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
1246 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
1247 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
1248 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
1249 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
1250 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
1251 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
1252 mount options.</p>
1253
1254 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
1255 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
1256 But according to
1257 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
1258 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
1259 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
1260 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
1261 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
1262 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
1263
1264 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
1265 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
1266 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
1267 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
1268 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
1269
1270       </div>
1271       <div class="tags">
1272
1273
1274         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/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1275
1276
1277       </div>
1278     </div>
1279     <div class="padding"></div>
1280
1281     <div class="entry">
1282       <div class="title">
1283         <a href="http://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>
1284       </div>
1285       <div class="date">
1286          3rd March 2017
1287       </div>
1288       <div class="body">
1289         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
1290 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1291 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
1292 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
1293 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
1294 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
1295 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
1296 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
1297 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
1298
1299 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
1300
1301 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
1302 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
1303 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
1304 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
1305 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
1306 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
1307 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
1308 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
1309
1310       </div>
1311       <div class="tags">
1312
1313
1314         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1315
1316
1317       </div>
1318     </div>
1319     <div class="padding"></div>
1320
1321     <div class="entry">
1322       <div class="title">
1323         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
1324       </div>
1325       <div class="date">
1326          1st March 2017
1327       </div>
1328       <div class="body">
1329         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
1330 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
1331 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
1332 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
1333 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
1334 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
1335 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
1336 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
1337 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
1338 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
1339 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1340
1341 <blockquote><pre>
1342 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1343   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1344   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1345      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1346      sleep 1; \
1347   done
1348 300
1349 0+1 oppføringer inn
1350 0+1 oppføringer ut
1351 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
1352 4
1353 8
1354 12
1355 17
1356 21
1357 %
1358 </pre></blockquote>
1359
1360 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
1361 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
1362 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
1363 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1364
1365 <blockquote><pre>
1366 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1367   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1368   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1369      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1370      sleep 1; \
1371   done
1372 1079
1373 0+1 oppføringer inn
1374 0+1 oppføringer ut
1375 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
1376 433
1377 1028
1378 1031
1379 1035
1380 1038
1381 %
1382 </pre></blockquote>
1383
1384 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
1385 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
1386
1387 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
1388 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
1389 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
1390 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
1391 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
1392 post.</p>
1393
1394       </div>
1395       <div class="tags">
1396
1397
1398         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>.
1399
1400
1401       </div>
1402     </div>
1403     <div class="padding"></div>
1404
1405     <div class="entry">
1406       <div class="title">
1407         <a href="http://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>
1408       </div>
1409       <div class="date">
1410          9th January 2017
1411       </div>
1412       <div class="body">
1413         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
1414 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
1415 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
1416 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
1417 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
1418 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
1419 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
1420 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
1421 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
1422 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
1423 this:
1424
1425 <p><pre>
1426 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1427  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
1428  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
1429  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
1430  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
1431  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
1432  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
1433  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
1434  8  * * *
1435  9  * * *
1436 [...]
1437 </pre></p>
1438
1439 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
1440 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
1441 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
1442 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
1443 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
1444 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
1445 traceroute request.</p>
1446
1447 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
1448 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
1449 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
1450 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
1451 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
1452
1453 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
1454 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
1455 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
1456 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
1457 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
1458 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
1459 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
1460 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
1461 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
1462
1463 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
1464 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
1465 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
1466 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
1467 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
1468 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
1469 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
1470 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
1471 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
1472 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
1473 render the page (in HAR format using
1474 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
1475 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
1476 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
1477 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
1478 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
1479
1480 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
1481 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>
1482
1483 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
1484 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
1485 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
1486 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
1487 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
1488 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
1489 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
1490 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
1491 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
1492 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
1493 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
1494 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
1495 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
1496 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
1497
1498 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
1499 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>
1500
1501 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
1502 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
1503 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
1504 question.
1505 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
1506 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
1507 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
1508 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
1509 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
1510 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
1511 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
1512
1513 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
1514 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>
1515
1516 <p>In the process, I came across the
1517 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
1518 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
1519 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
1520 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
1521 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
1522 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
1523 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
1524 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
1525 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
1526 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
1527 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
1528 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
1529 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
1530 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
1531
1532 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
1533 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>
1534
1535 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
1536 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
1537 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
1538 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
1539
1540 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
1541 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
1542 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
1543 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
1544 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
1545 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
1546 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
1547
1548 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
1549 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
1550 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
1551 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
1552 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
1553 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
1554 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
1555
1556 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
1557 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
1558 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1559 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1560
1561 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1562 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1563 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1564
1565       </div>
1566       <div class="tags">
1567
1568
1569         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/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1570
1571
1572       </div>
1573     </div>
1574     <div class="padding"></div>
1575
1576     <div class="entry">
1577       <div class="title">
1578         <a href="http://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>
1579       </div>
1580       <div class="date">
1581         23rd December 2016
1582       </div>
1583       <div class="body">
1584         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
1585 readers probably know, I have been working on the
1586 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
1587 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
1588 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
1589 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
1590 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
1591 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
1592 metadata format.  And today,
1593 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
1594 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
1595 ie using fnmatch():</p>
1596
1597 <p><pre>
1598 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
1599   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1600 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
1601 Name: pymissile
1602 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
1603 Package: pymissile
1604 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
1605 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
1606 Name: libnxt
1607 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
1608 Package: libnxt
1609 ---
1610 Identifier: t2n [generic]
1611 Name: t2n
1612 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
1613 Package: t2n
1614 ---
1615 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
1616 Name: python-nxt
1617 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
1618 Package: python-nxt
1619 ---
1620 Identifier: nbc [generic]
1621 Name: nbc
1622 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
1623 Package: nbc
1624 %
1625 </pre></p>
1626
1627 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
1628 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
1629
1630 <p><pre>
1631 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1632 pymissile
1633 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
1634 libnxt
1635 nbc
1636 python-nxt
1637 t2n
1638 %
1639 </pre></p>
1640
1641 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
1642 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
1643
1644 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
1645 make the most of the hardware they have, please
1646 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
1647 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
1648 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
1649 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
1650 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
1651 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
1652 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
1653 part of my involvement in
1654 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
1655 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
1656 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
1657 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
1658 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
1659 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
1660 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
1661 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
1662 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
1663
1664 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1665 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1666 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1667
1668       </div>
1669       <div class="tags">
1670
1671
1672         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>.
1673
1674
1675       </div>
1676     </div>
1677     <div class="padding"></div>
1678
1679     <div class="entry">
1680       <div class="title">
1681         <a href="http://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>
1682       </div>
1683       <div class="date">
1684         20th December 2016
1685       </div>
1686       <div class="body">
1687         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1688 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
1689 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
1690 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
1691 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
1692 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
1693 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
1694 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
1695 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
1696 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
1697
1698 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
1699
1700 <p><pre>
1701 % isenkram-lookup
1702 bluez
1703 cheese
1704 ethtool
1705 fprintd
1706 fprintd-demo
1707 gkrellm-thinkbat
1708 hdapsd
1709 libpam-fprintd
1710 pidgin-blinklight
1711 thinkfan
1712 tlp
1713 tp-smapi-dkms
1714 tp-smapi-source
1715 tpb
1716 %
1717 </pre></p>
1718
1719 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
1720 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
1721 I have all the firmware my machine need:
1722
1723 <p><pre>
1724 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1725 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
1726 %
1727 </pre></p>
1728
1729 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
1730 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
1731 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
1732 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
1733 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
1734 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
1735 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
1736 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
1737
1738 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
1739 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
1740 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
1741
1742 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
1743 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
1744 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
1745 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
1746 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
1747 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
1748 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
1749 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
1750 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
1751 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
1752 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
1753 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
1754 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
1755 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
1756 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
1757 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
1758 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
1759 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
1760 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
1761 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
1762 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
1763 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
1764 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
1765 zd1211-firmware</p>
1766
1767 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
1768 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
1769 maintainer to
1770 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
1771 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
1772 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
1773 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
1774
1775 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
1776 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
1777 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
1778 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
1779 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
1780
1781       </div>
1782       <div class="tags">
1783
1784
1785         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>.
1786
1787
1788       </div>
1789     </div>
1790     <div class="padding"></div>
1791
1792     <div class="entry">
1793       <div class="title">
1794         <a href="http://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>
1795       </div>
1796       <div class="date">
1797         11th December 2016
1798       </div>
1799       <div class="body">
1800         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
1801
1802 <p>In my early years, I played
1803 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
1804 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
1805 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
1806 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
1807 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
1808 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
1809 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
1810 small.</p>
1811
1812 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
1813 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
1814 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
1815 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
1816 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
1817 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
1818 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
1819 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
1820 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
1821
1822 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
1823 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
1824 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
1825 advantages of the
1826 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
1827 where information about each planet is easily available with common
1828 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
1829 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
1830 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
1831 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
1832 after less then a week.</p>
1833
1834 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
1835 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
1836 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</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="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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1847
1848
1849       </div>
1850     </div>
1851     <div class="padding"></div>
1852
1853     <div class="entry">
1854       <div class="title">
1855         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
1856       </div>
1857       <div class="date">
1858         25th November 2016
1859       </div>
1860       <div class="body">
1861         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
1862 installation system, observing how using
1863 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
1864 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
1865 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
1866 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
1867 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
1868 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
1869 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
1870 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
1871 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
1872 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
1873 up the process make perfect sense.
1874
1875 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
1876 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
1877 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
1878 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
1879 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
1880 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
1881 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
1882 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
1883 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
1884 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
1885
1886 <blockquote><pre>
1887 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
1888 </pre></blockquote>
1889
1890 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
1891 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
1892 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
1893 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
1894 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
1895 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
1896 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
1897 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
1898 tested its impact.</p>
1899
1900
1901       </div>
1902       <div class="tags">
1903
1904
1905         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1906
1907
1908       </div>
1909     </div>
1910     <div class="padding"></div>
1911
1912     <div class="entry">
1913       <div class="title">
1914         <a href="http://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>
1915       </div>
1916       <div class="date">
1917         24th November 2016
1918       </div>
1919       <div class="body">
1920         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
1921 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
1922 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
1923 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
1924 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
1925 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
1926 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
1927 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
1928 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
1929 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
1930 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1931 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
1932 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1933 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
1934 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
1935 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
1936 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
1937 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1938 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
1939
1940 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
1941 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
1942 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
1943 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
1944 api.apertium.org.  Se
1945 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1946 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
1947 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
1948 nynorsk.</p>
1949
1950 <hr/>
1951
1952 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
1953 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
1954 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
1955 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
1956 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
1957 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
1958 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
1959 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
1960 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
1961 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
1962 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1963 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
1964 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1965 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
1966 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
1967 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
1968 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
1969 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1970 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
1971
1972 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
1973 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
1974 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
1975 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
1976 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
1977 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1978 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
1979 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
1980 nynorsk.</p>
1981
1982       </div>
1983       <div class="tags">
1984
1985
1986         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
1987
1988
1989       </div>
1990     </div>
1991     <div class="padding"></div>
1992
1993     <div class="entry">
1994       <div class="title">
1995         <a href="http://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>
1996       </div>
1997       <div class="date">
1998         13th November 2016
1999       </div>
2000       <div class="body">
2001         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
2002 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
2003 multi-threaded program, finally
2004 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
2005 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
2006 months since
2007 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
2008 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
2009 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
2010 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
2011 JavaScript libraries.</p>
2012
2013 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
2014
2015 <p><blockquote>
2016 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
2017 </blockquote></p>
2018
2019 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
2020 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
2021 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
2022 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
2023 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
2024
2025 <p><blockquote>
2026 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
2027 </blockquote></p>
2028
2029 <p>See the project home page and the
2030 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
2031 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
2032 working.</p>
2033
2034       </div>
2035       <div class="tags">
2036
2037
2038         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>.
2039
2040
2041       </div>
2042     </div>
2043     <div class="padding"></div>
2044
2045     <div class="entry">
2046       <div class="title">
2047         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
2048       </div>
2049       <div class="date">
2050          4th November 2016
2051       </div>
2052       <div class="body">
2053         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
2054 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
2055 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
2056 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
2057 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
2058 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
2059 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
2060 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
2061 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
2062 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
2063 and had
2064 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
2065 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
2066 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
2067 loved ones. :)</p>
2068
2069 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
2070 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
2071 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
2072 building
2073 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
2074 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
2075 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
2076 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
2077 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
2078 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
2079 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
2080 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
2081
2082 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
2083
2084 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
2085 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
2086 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
2087 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
2088 the battery status run low:</p>
2089
2090 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
2091    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
2092 </video></p>
2093
2094 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
2095 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
2096
2097 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
2098 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
2099 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
2100 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
2101 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
2102 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
2103 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
2104 should.</p>
2105
2106       </div>
2107       <div class="tags">
2108
2109
2110         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/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2111
2112
2113       </div>
2114     </div>
2115     <div class="padding"></div>
2116
2117     <div class="entry">
2118       <div class="title">
2119         <a href="http://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>
2120       </div>
2121       <div class="date">
2122         10th October 2016
2123       </div>
2124       <div class="body">
2125         <p>In July
2126 <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
2127 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
2128 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
2129 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
2130
2131 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
2132 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
2133 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
2134 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
2135 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
2136 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
2137 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
2138 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
2139 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
2140 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
2141 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
2142 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
2143 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
2144 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
2145 time.</p>
2146
2147 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
2148 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
2149 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
2150 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
2151 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
2152 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
2153 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
2154
2155 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
2156 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
2157 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
2158 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
2159 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
2160 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
2161 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
2162 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
2163 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
2164 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
2165
2166 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
2167
2168 <ol>
2169
2170 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
2171 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
2172 know, so you need to install it.
2173
2174 <pre>
2175 apt install git tor chromium
2176 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2177 </pre></li>
2178
2179 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
2180 block below.</li>
2181
2182 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
2183 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
2184
2185 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
2186 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
2187 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
2188 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
2189 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
2190
2191 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
2192 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
2193 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
2194 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
2195 a associated contact database.</li>
2196
2197 </ol>
2198
2199 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
2200 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
2201 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
2202 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
2203 example
2204 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
2205 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
2206 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
2207 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
2208 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
2209 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
2210 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
2211 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
2212 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
2213 working on Debian Stable.</p>
2214
2215 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
2216 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
2217 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
2218
2219 <pre>
2220 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
2221 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
2222 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
2223 --- a/js/background.js
2224 +++ b/js/background.js
2225 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
2226          });
2227      });
2228
2229 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2230 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
2231      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
2232 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2233 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2234      var messageReceiver;
2235      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2236          if (messageReceiver) {
2237 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
2238 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
2239 --- a/js/expire.js
2240 +++ b/js/expire.js
2241 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2242  ;(function() {
2243      'use strict';
2244 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2245 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
2246
2247      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2248
2249 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
2250 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
2251 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
2252 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
2253 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
2254              return {
2255                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
2256                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
2257 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
2258 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
2259 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
2260              };
2261          },
2262          clearQR: function() {
2263 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
2264 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
2265 --- a/options.html
2266 +++ b/options.html
2267 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
2268          &lt;div class='nav'>
2269            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
2270            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
2271 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
2272 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
2273 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
2274 +
2275 +         &lt;/div>
2276            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
2277            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
2278            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
2279 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
2280 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
2281 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
2282 +#!/bin/sh
2283 +set -e
2284 +cd $(dirname $0)
2285 +mkdir -p userdata
2286 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
2287 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
2288 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
2289 +fi
2290 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
2291 +exec chromium \
2292 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2293 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2294 EOF
2295 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
2296 </pre>
2297
2298 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2299 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2300 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2301
2302       </div>
2303       <div class="tags">
2304
2305
2306         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2307
2308
2309       </div>
2310     </div>
2311     <div class="padding"></div>
2312
2313     <div class="entry">
2314       <div class="title">
2315         <a href="http://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>
2316       </div>
2317       <div class="date">
2318          7th October 2016
2319       </div>
2320       <div class="body">
2321         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2322 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
2323 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
2324 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
2325 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
2326 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
2327 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
2328 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
2329 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
2330 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
2331 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
2332 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
2333 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
2334
2335 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
2336 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
2337 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
2338 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
2339 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
2340 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
2341
2342 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
2343 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
2344 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
2345 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
2346 identifiers.</p>
2347
2348 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
2349 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
2350 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
2351 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
2352 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
2353 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
2354 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
2355 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
2356 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
2357 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
2358 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
2359 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
2360 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
2361 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
2362
2363 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
2364 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
2365 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
2366 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
2367 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
2368 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
2369 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
2370
2371 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
2372 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
2373 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
2374 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
2375 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
2376 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
2377 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
2378 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
2379 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
2380 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
2381 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
2382 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
2383 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
2384 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
2385 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
2386 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
2387 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
2388
2389 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
2390 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
2391 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
2392 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
2393 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
2394 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
2395 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
2396
2397 <p><pre>
2398 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
2399     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
2400 </pre></p>
2401
2402 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
2403 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
2404 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
2405 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
2406 to detect this?</p>
2407
2408 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
2409 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
2410 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
2411 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
2412 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
2413 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
2414 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
2415 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
2416 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
2417 directly if no such class exist.</p>
2418
2419 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2420 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2421 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2422
2423 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
2424 please join us on our IRC channel
2425 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
2426 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
2427 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
2428 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
2429
2430 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2431 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2432 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2433
2434       </div>
2435       <div class="tags">
2436
2437
2438         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
2439
2440
2441       </div>
2442     </div>
2443     <div class="padding"></div>
2444
2445     <div class="entry">
2446       <div class="title">
2447         <a href="http://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>
2448       </div>
2449       <div class="date">
2450         30th August 2016
2451       </div>
2452       <div class="body">
2453         <p>In April we
2454 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2455 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2456 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2457 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2458 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2459 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2460 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2461 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2462 contributing using
2463 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2464 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2465 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2466 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2467 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2468 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2469 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2470
2471 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2472 electronic form.</p>
2473
2474       </div>
2475       <div class="tags">
2476
2477
2478         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2479
2480
2481       </div>
2482     </div>
2483     <div class="padding"></div>
2484
2485     <div class="entry">
2486       <div class="title">
2487         <a href="http://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>
2488       </div>
2489       <div class="date">
2490         11th August 2016
2491       </div>
2492       <div class="body">
2493         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2494 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2495 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2496 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2497 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2498 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2499 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2500 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2501 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2502 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2503 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2504 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2505 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2506
2507 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2508 get the system into Debian.  I
2509 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2510 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2511 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2512 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2513 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2514 profiling information included in the source package.
2515 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2516
2517 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2518 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
2519
2520 <p><blockquote><pre>
2521 coz run --- program-to-run
2522 </pre></blockquote></p>
2523
2524 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
2525 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
2526 most, use a web browser and either point it to
2527 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
2528 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
2529 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
2530 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
2531 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
2532 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
2533 targeted experiments.</p>
2534
2535 <p>A video published by ACM
2536 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
2537 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
2538 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
2539 titled
2540 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
2541 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
2542
2543 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
2544 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
2545 because it uses a
2546 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
2547 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
2548 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
2549 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
2550
2551 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
2552 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
2553 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
2554 C++ libraries.</p>
2555
2556       </div>
2557       <div class="tags">
2558
2559
2560         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2561
2562
2563       </div>
2564     </div>
2565     <div class="padding"></div>
2566
2567     <div class="entry">
2568       <div class="title">
2569         <a href="http://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>
2570       </div>
2571       <div class="date">
2572          7th July 2016
2573       </div>
2574       <div class="body">
2575         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
2576 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
2577 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
2578 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
2579 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
2580 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
2581 microphone The initial idea had been to just
2582 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
2583 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
2584 until a few days ago.</p>
2585
2586 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
2587 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
2588 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
2589 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
2590 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
2591 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
2592 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
2593
2594 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
2595 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
2596 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
2597 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
2598 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
2599 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
2600 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
2601 him.</p>
2602
2603 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
2604 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
2605 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
2606 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
2607 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
2608 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
2609 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
2610 devices it would work for.</p>
2611
2612 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
2613 followed some instructions
2614 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
2615 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
2616 machine with Debian testing:</p>
2617
2618 <p><pre>
2619 adb reboot-bootloader
2620 fastboot oem rebootRUU
2621 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2622 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2623 fastboot reboot
2624 </pre></p>
2625
2626 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
2627 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
2628 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
2629 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
2630 too.</p>
2631
2632 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
2633 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
2634 like this:</p>
2635
2636 <p><pre>
2637 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
2638 </pre>
2639
2640 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
2641 this:</p>
2642
2643 <p><pre>
2644 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
2645 </pre></p>
2646
2647 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
2648 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
2649 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
2650 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
2651 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
2652
2653       </div>
2654       <div class="tags">
2655
2656
2657         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
2658
2659
2660       </div>
2661     </div>
2662     <div class="padding"></div>
2663
2664     <div class="entry">
2665       <div class="title">
2666         <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">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
2667       </div>
2668       <div class="date">
2669          3rd July 2016
2670       </div>
2671       <div class="body">
2672         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
2673 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
2674 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
2675 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
2676 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
2677 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
2678 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
2679 Github source, compared it to the source in
2680 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
2681 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
2682 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
2683 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
2684 the recipe how I did it.</p>
2685
2686 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
2687
2688 <pre>
2689 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2690 </pre>
2691
2692 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
2693 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
2694
2695 <pre>
2696 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
2697 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2698 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2699 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2700 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
2701          });
2702      });
2703
2704 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2705 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2706 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
2707 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2708      var messageReceiver;
2709      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2710          if (messageReceiver) {
2711 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
2712 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2713 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2714 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2715  ;(function() {
2716      'use strict';
2717 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2718 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
2719
2720      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2721
2722 EOF
2723 </pre>
2724
2725 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
2726 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
2727 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
2728 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
2729
2730 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
2731 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
2732
2733 <pre>
2734 #!/bin/sh
2735 cd $(dirname $0)
2736 mkdir -p userdata
2737 exec chromium \
2738   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2739   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2740 </pre>
2741
2742 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
2743 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
2744 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
2745 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
2746 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
2747
2748 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
2749 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
2750 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
2751 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
2752 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
2753 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
2754 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
2755 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
2756 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
2757 Signal from my laptop.
2758
2759 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
2760 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
2761 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
2762 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
2763 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
2764 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
2765 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
2766 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
2767 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
2768 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
2769 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
2770 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
2771
2772 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
2773 on this topic in
2774 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
2775 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
2776 phone</a>.</p>
2777
2778       </div>
2779       <div class="tags">
2780
2781
2782         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2783
2784
2785       </div>
2786     </div>
2787     <div class="padding"></div>
2788
2789     <div class="entry">
2790       <div class="title">
2791         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2792       </div>
2793       <div class="date">
2794          6th June 2016
2795       </div>
2796       <div class="body">
2797         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
2798 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
2799 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
2800 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
2801 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
2802 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
2803 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
2804 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
2805 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
2806
2807 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
2808 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
2809 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
2810 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
2811 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
2812 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
2813 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
2814
2815 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
2816 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
2817 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
2818 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
2819 toten and parole.</p>
2820
2821 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
2822 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
2823 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
2824 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
2825 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
2826 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
2827 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
2828 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
2829 formats.</p>
2830
2831       </div>
2832       <div class="tags">
2833
2834
2835         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2836
2837
2838       </div>
2839     </div>
2840     <div class="padding"></div>
2841
2842     <div class="entry">
2843       <div class="title">
2844         <a href="http://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>
2845       </div>
2846       <div class="date">
2847          5th June 2016
2848       </div>
2849       <div class="body">
2850         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
2851 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
2852 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
2853 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
2854 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
2855 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
2856 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
2857 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
2858 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
2859 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
2860 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
2861 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
2862 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
2863 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
2864 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
2865 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
2866 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
2867 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
2868 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
2869 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
2870
2871 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
2872 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
2873 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
2874 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
2875 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
2876 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
2877 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
2878 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
2879 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
2880 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
2881 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
2882 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
2883 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
2884 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
2885
2886 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
2887 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
2888 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
2889 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
2890 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
2891 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
2892 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
2893 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
2894
2895 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
2896 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
2897 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
2898 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
2899 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
2900 information is collected from
2901 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
2902 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
2903 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
2904 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
2905 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
2906 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
2907 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
2908 type (preferably
2909 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
2910 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
2911 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
2912 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
2913
2914 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
2915 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
2916 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
2917
2918 <p><blockquote><pre>
2919 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2920 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
2921   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
2922     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
2923     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
2924     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
2925   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
2926 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
2927 </pre></blockquote></p>
2928
2929 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
2930 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
2931 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
2932 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
2933
2934 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
2935 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
2936 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
2937
2938 <p><blockquote><pre>
2939 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
2940 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
2941 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
2942 %
2943 </pre></blockquote></p>
2944
2945 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
2946 MimeType= line.</p>
2947
2948 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
2949 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
2950 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
2951 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
2952 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
2953 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
2954 fixed. :)</p>
2955
2956       </div>
2957       <div class="tags">
2958
2959
2960         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>.
2961
2962
2963       </div>
2964     </div>
2965     <div class="padding"></div>
2966
2967     <div class="entry">
2968       <div class="title">
2969         <a href="http://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>
2970       </div>
2971       <div class="date">
2972         25th May 2016
2973       </div>
2974       <div class="body">
2975         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
2976 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
2977 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
2978 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
2979 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
2980 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
2981 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
2982 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
2983 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
2984 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
2985 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
2986 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
2987
2988 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
2989 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
2990 is going away and is generally being replaced by
2991 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
2992 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
2993 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
2994 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
2995 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
2996 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
2997 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
2998 and see if it is recognised.</p>
2999
3000 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
3001 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
3002 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
3003
3004 <p><blockquote><pre>
3005 % isenkram-lookup
3006 bluez
3007 cheese
3008 fprintd
3009 fprintd-demo
3010 gkrellm-thinkbat
3011 hdapsd
3012 libpam-fprintd
3013 pidgin-blinklight
3014 thinkfan
3015 tleds
3016 tp-smapi-dkms
3017 tp-smapi-source
3018 tpb
3019 %p
3020 </pre></blockquote></p>
3021
3022 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
3023 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
3024 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3025 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
3026 See
3027 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
3028 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
3029
3030       </div>
3031       <div class="tags">
3032
3033
3034         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>.
3035
3036
3037       </div>
3038     </div>
3039     <div class="padding"></div>
3040
3041     <div class="entry">
3042       <div class="title">
3043         <a href="http://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>
3044       </div>
3045       <div class="date">
3046         23rd May 2016
3047       </div>
3048       <div class="body">
3049         <p>Yesterday I updated the
3050 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
3051 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
3052 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
3053 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
3054 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
3055 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
3056 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
3057 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
3058 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
3059 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
3060
3061 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
3062 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
3063 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
3064 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
3065 capacity.</p>
3066
3067 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
3068
3069 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
3070 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
3071 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
3072 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
3073
3074 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
3075
3076 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
3077 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
3078 shrinking. :(</p>
3079
3080 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
3081 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
3082 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
3083 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
3084 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
3085 machine.</p>
3086
3087 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3088 check out the
3089 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3090 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3091 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
3092 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3093 Patches are very welcome.</p>
3094
3095 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3096 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3097 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3098
3099       </div>
3100       <div class="tags">
3101
3102
3103         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>.
3104
3105
3106       </div>
3107     </div>
3108     <div class="padding"></div>
3109
3110     <div class="entry">
3111       <div class="title">
3112         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
3113       </div>
3114       <div class="date">
3115         12th May 2016
3116       </div>
3117       <div class="body">
3118         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
3119 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
3120 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
3121 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
3122 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
3123 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3124 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
3125 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
3126 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
3127 great if you could help out with
3128 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
3129 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
3130
3131       </div>
3132       <div class="tags">
3133
3134
3135         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>.
3136
3137
3138       </div>
3139     </div>
3140     <div class="padding"></div>
3141
3142     <div class="entry">
3143       <div class="title">
3144         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
3145       </div>
3146       <div class="date">
3147          8th May 2016
3148       </div>
3149       <div class="body">
3150         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
3151 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
3152
3153 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
3154 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
3155 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
3156 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
3157 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
3158 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
3159 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
3160 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
3161 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
3162 players.</p>
3163
3164 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
3165 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
3166 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
3167 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
3168 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
3169 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
3170 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
3171 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
3172 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
3173 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
3174 support most file formats.</p>
3175
3176 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
3177 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
3178 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
3179 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
3180 listed first in the table.</p>
3181
3182 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
3183 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
3184 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
3185 support?</p>
3186
3187       </div>
3188       <div class="tags">
3189
3190
3191         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3192
3193
3194       </div>
3195     </div>
3196     <div class="padding"></div>
3197
3198     <div class="entry">
3199       <div class="title">
3200         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
3201       </div>
3202       <div class="date">
3203          4th May 2016
3204       </div>
3205       <div class="body">
3206         A friend of mine made me aware of
3207 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
3208 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
3209 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
3210
3211 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
3212 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
3213 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
3214 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
3215 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
3216 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
3217 production started.</p>
3218
3219 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
3220 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
3221 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
3222
3223       </div>
3224       <div class="tags">
3225
3226
3227         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>.
3228
3229
3230       </div>
3231     </div>
3232     <div class="padding"></div>
3233
3234     <div class="entry">
3235       <div class="title">
3236         <a href="http://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>
3237       </div>
3238       <div class="date">
3239         10th April 2016
3240       </div>
3241       <div class="body">
3242         <p>During this weekends
3243 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
3244 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
3245 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
3246 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
3247 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
3248 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
3249 contributing using
3250 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3251 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3252 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3253 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3254 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3255 contributors</a>.</p>
3256
3257 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
3258 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
3259 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
3260 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
3261 available for many more languages.</p>
3262
3263       </div>
3264       <div class="tags">
3265
3266
3267         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3268
3269
3270       </div>
3271     </div>
3272     <div class="padding"></div>
3273
3274     <div class="entry">
3275       <div class="title">
3276         <a href="http://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>
3277       </div>
3278       <div class="date">
3279          7th April 2016
3280       </div>
3281       <div class="body">
3282         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
3283 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
3284 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
3285 But I might be wrong.</p>
3286
3287 <p>According to
3288 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
3289 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
3290 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
3291 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
3292 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
3293 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
3294 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
3295 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
3296 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
3297 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
3298
3299 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
3300 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
3301 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
3302 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
3303 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
3304 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
3305 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
3306 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3307 team status page</a>, and
3308 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
3309 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
3310
3311 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
3312 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
3313 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
3314 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
3315 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
3316 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
3317 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
3318 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
3319 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
3320 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
3321 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
3322 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
3323
3324       </div>
3325       <div class="tags">
3326
3327
3328         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>.
3329
3330
3331       </div>
3332     </div>
3333     <div class="padding"></div>
3334
3335     <div class="entry">
3336       <div class="title">
3337         <a href="http://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>
3338       </div>
3339       <div class="date">
3340         23rd March 2016
3341       </div>
3342       <div class="body">
3343         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
3344 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
3345 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
3346 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
3347 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
3348 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
3349 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
3350 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
3351
3352 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
3353 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
3354 and lifetime prediction by running:
3355
3356 <p><pre>
3357 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
3358 </pre></p>
3359
3360 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
3361
3362 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
3363 entry yet):</p>
3364
3365 <p><pre>
3366 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
3367 </pre></p>
3368
3369 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
3370 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
3371 few years of data.</p>
3372
3373 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
3374 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
3375 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
3376 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
3377 know.  The issue is reported as
3378 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
3379 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
3380 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
3381 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
3382 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
3383
3384 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3385 check out the
3386 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3387 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3388 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
3389 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3390 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
3391
3392       </div>
3393       <div class="tags">
3394
3395
3396         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>.
3397
3398
3399       </div>
3400     </div>
3401     <div class="padding"></div>
3402
3403     <div class="entry">
3404       <div class="title">
3405         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
3406       </div>
3407       <div class="date">
3408         15th March 2016
3409       </div>
3410       <div class="body">
3411         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
3412 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
3413 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
3414 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
3415 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
3416 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
3417 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
3418 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
3419 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
3420 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
3421 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
3422
3423 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
3424 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
3425 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
3426 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
3427 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
3428 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
3429 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
3430 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
3431 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
3432 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
3433 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
3434
3435 <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>
3436
3437 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
3438 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
3439 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
3440 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
3441 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
3442 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
3443
3444 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
3445 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
3446 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
3447 and graphing.</p>
3448
3449 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
3450 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
3451 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
3452 on
3453 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3454 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
3455
3456       </div>
3457       <div class="tags">
3458
3459
3460         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>.
3461
3462
3463       </div>
3464     </div>
3465     <div class="padding"></div>
3466
3467     <div class="entry">
3468       <div class="title">
3469         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
3470       </div>
3471       <div class="date">
3472         19th February 2016
3473       </div>
3474       <div class="body">
3475         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
3476 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
3477 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
3478 the code in the package in question, preferably in
3479 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
3480 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
3481
3482 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
3483 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
3484 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
3485 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
3486 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
3487 out what was wrong with
3488 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
3489 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
3490 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
3491 semi-automatically.</p>
3492
3493 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
3494 file based on the code in the source package,
3495 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
3496 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
3497 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
3498 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
3499 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
3500 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
3501 option in
3502 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
3503 blog posts from 2014</a>.
3504
3505 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
3506
3507 <p><pre>
3508 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
3509 </pre></p>
3510
3511 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
3512 this might not be the best option.</p>
3513
3514 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
3515 this approach in
3516 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
3517 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
3518 dpkg-copyright' option:
3519
3520 <p><pre>
3521 cme update dpkg-copyright
3522 </pre></p>
3523
3524 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
3525 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
3526
3527 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
3528 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
3529 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
3530 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
3531 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
3532 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
3533 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
3534 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
3535 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
3536 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
3537
3538 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
3539 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
3540 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
3541 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
3542
3543 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
3544 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
3545 planet.debian.org.</p>
3546
3547 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3548 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3549 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3550
3551 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
3552 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
3553
3554 <p><pre>
3555 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
3556   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
3557 </pre></p>
3558
3559 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
3560 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
3561 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
3562 with my packages in the future.</p>
3563
3564 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
3565 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
3566 command line.</p>
3567
3568       </div>
3569       <div class="tags">
3570
3571
3572         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>.
3573
3574
3575       </div>
3576     </div>
3577     <div class="padding"></div>
3578
3579     <div class="entry">
3580       <div class="title">
3581         <a href="http://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>
3582       </div>
3583       <div class="date">
3584          4th February 2016
3585       </div>
3586       <div class="body">
3587         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
3588 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
3589 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
3590 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
3591 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
3592 about. :)</p>
3593
3594 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
3595 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
3596 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
3597 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
3598 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
3599 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
3600
3601 <blockquote><pre>
3602 % apt install appstream
3603 [...]
3604 % apt update
3605 [...]
3606 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
3607   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3608 firmware-qlogic
3609 %
3610 </pre></blockquote>
3611
3612 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
3613 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
3614 a way appstream can use.</p>
3615
3616 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
3617 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
3618 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
3619 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
3620 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
3621 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
3622
3623 <blockquote><pre>
3624 % apt install appstream
3625 [...]
3626 % apt update
3627 [...]
3628 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
3629   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3630 bkchem
3631 phototonic
3632 inkscape
3633 shutter
3634 tetzle
3635 geeqie
3636 xia
3637 pinta
3638 gthumb
3639 karbon
3640 comix
3641 mirage
3642 viewnior
3643 postr
3644 ristretto
3645 kolourpaint4
3646 eog
3647 eom
3648 gimagereader
3649 midori
3650 %
3651 </pre></blockquote>
3652
3653 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
3654 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
3655
3656       </div>
3657       <div class="tags">
3658
3659
3660         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>.
3661
3662
3663       </div>
3664     </div>
3665     <div class="padding"></div>
3666
3667     <div class="entry">
3668       <div class="title">
3669         <a href="http://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>
3670       </div>
3671       <div class="date">
3672         24th January 2016
3673       </div>
3674       <div class="body">
3675         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
3676 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
3677 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
3678 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
3679 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
3680 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
3681 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
3682 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
3683 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
3684 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
3685 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
3686 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
3687 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
3688 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
3689 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
3690 entities.</p>
3691
3692 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
3693
3694 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
3695 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
3696 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
3697 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
3698 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
3699 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
3700 tool to do so is called
3701 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
3702 discovered it when I read
3703 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
3704 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
3705 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
3706 The python program was in Debian, but
3707 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
3708 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
3709 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
3710 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
3711 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
3712 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
3713 are now included
3714 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
3715
3716 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
3717 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
3718 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
3719 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
3720 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
3721 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
3722 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
3723 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
3724 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
3725 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
3726 about yourself with the services.</p>
3727
3728 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
3729 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
3730 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
3731 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
3732 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
3733 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
3734 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
3735 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
3736 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
3737 things.  A similar technique have been
3738 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
3739 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
3740 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
3741 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
3742 public.</p>
3743
3744 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
3745 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
3746 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
3747 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
3748
3749 <p>(I have uploaded
3750 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
3751 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
3752 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
3753
3754       </div>
3755       <div class="tags">
3756
3757
3758         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3759
3760
3761       </div>
3762     </div>
3763     <div class="padding"></div>
3764
3765     <div class="entry">
3766       <div class="title">
3767         <a href="http://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>
3768       </div>
3769       <div class="date">
3770         15th January 2016
3771       </div>
3772       <div class="body">
3773         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
3774 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
3775 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
3776 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
3777 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
3778 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
3779 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
3780 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
3781 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
3782 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
3783 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
3784 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
3785 was not the first to propose this, as the
3786 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
3787 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
3788 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
3789 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
3790
3791 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
3792 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
3793 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
3794 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
3795 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
3796
3797 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
3798 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
3799 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
3800 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
3801 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
3802 done in /etc/.</p>
3803
3804 <blockquote><pre>
3805 apt install apt-transport-tor
3806 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3807 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3808 </pre></blockquote>
3809
3810 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
3811 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
3812 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
3813 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
3814
3815 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
3816 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
3817 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
3818 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
3819 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
3820 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
3821
3822 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
3823 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
3824 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
3825 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
3826 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
3827
3828 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
3829 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
3830 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
3831 system.</p>
3832
3833       </div>
3834       <div class="tags">
3835
3836
3837         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3838
3839
3840       </div>
3841     </div>
3842     <div class="padding"></div>
3843
3844     <div class="entry">
3845       <div class="title">
3846         <a href="http://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>
3847       </div>
3848       <div class="date">
3849         23rd December 2015
3850       </div>
3851       <div class="body">
3852         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
3853 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
3854 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
3855 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
3856 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
3857 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
3858
3859 <p>A few days I came across
3860 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
3861 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
3862 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
3863 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
3864 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
3865 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
3866 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
3867 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
3868 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
3869 discovered the developer
3870 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
3871 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
3872 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
3873 archive.</p>
3874
3875 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
3876 it into Debian, where it currently
3877 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
3878 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
3879
3880 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
3881 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
3882 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
3883 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
3884 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
3885 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
3886 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
3887 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
3888 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
3889 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
3890 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
3891 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
3892
3893 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
3894 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
3895 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
3896 package show up in unstable.</p>
3897
3898       </div>
3899       <div class="tags">
3900
3901
3902         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3903
3904
3905       </div>
3906     </div>
3907     <div class="padding"></div>
3908
3909     <div class="entry">
3910       <div class="title">
3911         <a href="http://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>
3912       </div>
3913       <div class="date">
3914         20th December 2015
3915       </div>
3916       <div class="body">
3917         <p>Around three years ago, I created
3918 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
3919 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
3920 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
3921 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
3922 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
3923 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
3924 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
3925 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
3926 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
3927 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
3928 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
3929 with.</p>
3930
3931 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
3932 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
3933 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
3934 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
3935 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
3936 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
3937 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3938 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
3939 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
3940 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
3941 Debian version of appstream.</p>
3942
3943 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
3944 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
3945 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
3946 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
3947 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
3948 how do add the required
3949 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
3950 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
3951 this content:</p>
3952
3953 <blockquote><pre>
3954 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3955 &lt;component&gt;
3956   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
3957   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
3958   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
3959   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
3960   &lt;description&gt;
3961     &lt;p&gt;
3962       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
3963       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
3964       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
3965       launcher.
3966     &lt;/p&gt;
3967   &lt;/description&gt;
3968   &lt;provides&gt;
3969     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
3970   &lt;/provides&gt;
3971 &lt;/component&gt;
3972 </pre></blockquote>
3973
3974 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
3975 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
3976 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
3977 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
3978 0202.</p>
3979
3980 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
3981 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
3982 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
3983 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
3984 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
3985 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
3986 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
3987 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
3988
3989 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
3990 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
3991 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
3992 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
3993 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
3994
3995 <blockquote><pre>
3996 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
3997 </pre></blockquote>
3998
3999 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
4000 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
4001 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
4002 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
4003 question.</p>
4004
4005 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
4006 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
4007
4008 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
4009 try running this command on the command line:</p>
4010
4011 <blockquote><pre>
4012 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
4013 </pre></blockquote>
4014
4015 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4016 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
4017 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
4018
4019       </div>
4020       <div class="tags">
4021
4022
4023         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>.
4024
4025
4026       </div>
4027     </div>
4028     <div class="padding"></div>
4029
4030     <div class="entry">
4031       <div class="title">
4032         <a href="http://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>
4033       </div>
4034       <div class="date">
4035         30th November 2015
4036       </div>
4037       <div class="body">
4038         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
4039 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
4040 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
4041 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
4042 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
4043
4044 <blockquote>
4045
4046 <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>
4047
4048 <blockquote>
4049 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
4050
4051 The first step is to choose a
4052 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
4053 code.<br/>
4054
4055 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
4056 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
4057
4058 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
4059 work<br/>
4060
4061 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
4062 </blockquote>
4063
4064 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
4065 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
4066 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
4067 0x57</a></small></p>
4068
4069 <p>As the Debian Website
4070 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
4071 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
4072 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
4073 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
4074 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
4075 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
4076 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
4077 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
4078 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
4079 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
4080 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
4081 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
4082 Freedom">FaiF</a>
4083 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
4084 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
4085 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
4086 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
4087 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
4088 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
4089 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
4090 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
4091 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
4092 In March the SFC supported a
4093 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
4094 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
4095 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
4096 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
4097 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
4098 conferences
4099 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
4100 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
4101 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
4102 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
4103 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
4104 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
4105 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
4106 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
4107 Software.</p>
4108
4109 <p>If you support Free Software,
4110 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
4111 what the SFC do, agree with their
4112 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
4113 principles</a>, are happy about their
4114 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
4115 work on a project that is an SFC
4116 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
4117 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
4118 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
4119 Allan Webber</a>,
4120 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
4121 Smith</a>,
4122 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
4123 Bacon</a>, myself and
4124 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
4125 becoming a
4126 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
4127 next week your donation will be
4128 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
4129 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
4130 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
4131 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
4132 social media accounts.</p>
4133
4134 </blockquote>
4135
4136 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
4137 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
4138 supporter too?</p>
4139
4140       </div>
4141       <div class="tags">
4142
4143
4144         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4145
4146
4147       </div>
4148     </div>
4149     <div class="padding"></div>
4150
4151     <div class="entry">
4152       <div class="title">
4153         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
4154       </div>
4155       <div class="date">
4156         17th November 2015
4157       </div>
4158       <div class="body">
4159         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
4160 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
4161 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
4162 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
4163 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
4164 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
4165 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
4166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
4167 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
4168 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
4169
4170 <pre>
4171 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
4172       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
4173 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
4174 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
4175 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4176 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4177 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4178 </pre>
4179
4180 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
4181 my old key.</p>
4182
4183 <p>If you signed my old key
4184 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
4185 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
4186 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
4187 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
4188
4189       </div>
4190       <div class="tags">
4191
4192
4193         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4194
4195
4196       </div>
4197     </div>
4198     <div class="padding"></div>
4199
4200     <div class="entry">
4201       <div class="title">
4202         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
4203       </div>
4204       <div class="date">
4205         24th September 2015
4206       </div>
4207       <div class="body">
4208         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
4209 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
4210 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
4211 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
4212 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
4213 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
4214 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
4215
4216 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
4217
4218 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
4219 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
4220 by someone else.  I found
4221 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
4222 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
4223 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
4224 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
4225 from him.  Via
4226 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
4227 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
4228 discovered
4229 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
4230 available in Debian.</p>
4231
4232 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
4233 battery stats ever since. Now my
4234 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
4235 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
4236 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
4237 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
4238
4239 <pre>
4240 #!/bin/sh
4241 # Inspired by
4242 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
4243 # See also
4244 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
4245 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
4246
4247 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
4248     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
4249
4250 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
4251     (
4252         printf "timestamp,"
4253         for f in $files; do
4254             printf "%s," $f
4255         done
4256         echo
4257     ) > "$logfile"
4258 fi
4259
4260 log_battery() {
4261     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
4262     # when several log processes run in parallel.
4263     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
4264         for f in $files; do \
4265             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
4266         done)
4267     echo "$msg"
4268 }
4269
4270 cd /sys/class/power_supply
4271
4272 for bat in BAT*; do
4273     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
4274 done
4275 </pre>
4276
4277 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
4278 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
4279 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
4280 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
4281 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
4282 The code for the Debian package
4283 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
4284 available on github</a>.</p>
4285
4286 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
4287
4288 <pre>
4289 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
4290 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
4291 [...]
4292 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4293 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4294 </pre>
4295
4296 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
4297 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
4298 battery.</p>
4299
4300 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
4301 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
4302 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
4303 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
4304 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
4305 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
4306 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
4307 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
4308 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
4309 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
4310 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
4311 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
4312 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
4313 Linux too.</p>
4314
4315 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
4316 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
4317 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
4318 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
4319 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
4320 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
4321 load).</p>
4322
4323 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
4324 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
4325 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
4326 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
4327 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
4328 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
4329 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
4330 those.</p>
4331
4332 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
4333 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
4334 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
4335 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
4336 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
4337 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
4338 specific.</p>
4339
4340       </div>
4341       <div class="tags">
4342
4343
4344         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>.
4345
4346
4347       </div>
4348     </div>
4349     <div class="padding"></div>
4350
4351     <div class="entry">
4352       <div class="title">
4353         <a href="http://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>
4354       </div>
4355       <div class="date">
4356          5th July 2015
4357       </div>
4358       <div class="body">
4359         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
4360 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
4361 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
4362 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
4363 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
4364 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
4365 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
4366 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
4367 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
4368 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
4369 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
4370
4371 <p>One tip I got was to use the
4372 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
4373 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
4374 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
4375 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
4376 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
4377 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
4378
4379 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
4380 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
4381 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
4382 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
4383 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
4384 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
4385 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
4386 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
4387 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
4388 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
4389 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
4390 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
4391 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
4392 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
4393 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
4394
4395 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
4396 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
4397 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
4398 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
4399
4400 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
4401 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
4402
4403 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
4404 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
4405 different
4406 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
4407 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
4408
4409       </div>
4410       <div class="tags">
4411
4412
4413         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>.
4414
4415
4416       </div>
4417     </div>
4418     <div class="padding"></div>
4419
4420     <div class="entry">
4421       <div class="title">
4422         <a href="http://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>
4423       </div>
4424       <div class="date">
4425          3rd July 2015
4426       </div>
4427       <div class="body">
4428         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
4429 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
4430 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
4431 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
4432 flickering.</p>
4433
4434 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
4435 still as
4436 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
4437 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
4438 good help from
4439 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
4440 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
4441 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
4442 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
4443 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
4444 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
4445 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
4446 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
4447 deteriorated since X41.</p>
4448
4449 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
4450 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
4451 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
4452 have suggestions.</p>
4453
4454 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
4455 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
4456 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
4457
4458       </div>
4459       <div class="tags">
4460
4461
4462         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>.
4463
4464
4465       </div>
4466     </div>
4467     <div class="padding"></div>
4468
4469     <div class="entry">
4470       <div class="title">
4471         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
4472       </div>
4473       <div class="date">
4474         22nd November 2014
4475       </div>
4476       <div class="body">
4477         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
4478 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
4479 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
4480 courtesy of
4481 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
4482 Schubert</a> and
4483 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
4484 McVittie</a>.
4485
4486 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
4487 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
4488 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
4489 you upgrade:</p>
4490
4491 <p><blockquote><pre>
4492 Package: systemd-sysv
4493 Pin: release o=Debian
4494 Pin-Priority: -1
4495 </pre></blockquote><p>
4496
4497 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
4498 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
4499 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
4500 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
4501 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
4502
4503 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
4504 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
4505 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
4506 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
4507 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
4508 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
4509
4510 <p><blockquote><pre>
4511 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
4512 </pre></blockquote><p>
4513
4514 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
4515
4516 <p><blockquote><pre>
4517 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
4518 </pre></blockquote><p>
4519
4520 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
4521 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
4522
4523 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
4524 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
4525 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
4526 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
4527 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
4528 Jessie is released.</p>
4529
4530 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
4531 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
4532 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
4533 line.</p>
4534
4535       </div>
4536       <div class="tags">
4537
4538
4539         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4540
4541
4542       </div>
4543     </div>
4544     <div class="padding"></div>
4545
4546     <div class="entry">
4547       <div class="title">
4548         <a href="http://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>
4549       </div>
4550       <div class="date">
4551         10th November 2014
4552       </div>
4553       <div class="body">
4554         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
4555 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
4556 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
4557
4558 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
4559 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
4560 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
4561 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
4562 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
4563 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
4564 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
4565 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
4566 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
4567 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
4568 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
4569 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
4570 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
4571 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
4572 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
4573
4574 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
4575 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
4576 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
4577 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
4578 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
4579 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
4580 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
4581 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
4582 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
4583 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
4584 were fairly easy, and
4585 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
4586 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
4587 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
4588 useful approach.</p>
4589
4590 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
4591 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
4592 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
4593 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
4594 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
4595 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
4596 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
4597 this:</p>
4598
4599 <p><blockquote><pre>
4600 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
4601   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
4602 </pre></blockquote></p>
4603
4604 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
4605 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
4606
4607 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
4608 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
4609 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
4610 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
4611 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
4612 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
4613 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
4614 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
4615 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
4616 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
4617 system.</p>
4618
4619 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
4620 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
4621 SMTorP. :)</p>
4622
4623       </div>
4624       <div class="tags">
4625
4626
4627         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4628
4629
4630       </div>
4631     </div>
4632     <div class="padding"></div>
4633
4634     <div class="entry">
4635       <div class="title">
4636         <a href="http://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>
4637       </div>
4638       <div class="date">
4639         22nd October 2014
4640       </div>
4641       <div class="body">
4642         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
4643 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
4644 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
4645 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
4646 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
4647 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
4648 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
4649 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
4650 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
4651 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
4652 lists I recently took over:</p>
4653
4654 <p><blockquote><pre>
4655 % time listadmin xiph
4656 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4657 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4658
4659 real    0m1.709s
4660 user    0m0.232s
4661 sys     0m0.012s
4662 %
4663 </pre></blockquote></p>
4664
4665 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
4666 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
4667 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
4668 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
4669 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
4670 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
4671 program.</p>
4672
4673 <p>If you install
4674 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
4675 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
4676 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
4677
4678 <p><blockquote><pre>
4679 username username@example.org
4680 spamlevel 23
4681 default discard
4682 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
4683
4684 password secret
4685 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
4686 mailman-list@lists.example.com
4687
4688 password hidden
4689 other-list@otherserver.example.org
4690 </pre></blockquote></p>
4691
4692 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
4693 learn the details.</p>
4694
4695 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
4696 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
4697 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
4698 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
4699
4700 <p><blockquote><pre>
4701 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
4702 </pre></blockquote></p>
4703
4704 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
4705 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
4706 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
4707 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
4708 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
4709 email.</p>
4710
4711 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
4712 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
4713 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
4714 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
4715 software.</p>
4716
4717 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4718 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4719 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4720
4721 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
4722 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
4723 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
4724 sure why.</p>
4725
4726       </div>
4727       <div class="tags">
4728
4729
4730         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4731
4732
4733       </div>
4734     </div>
4735     <div class="padding"></div>
4736
4737     <div class="entry">
4738       <div class="title">
4739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
4740       </div>
4741       <div class="date">
4742         17th October 2014
4743       </div>
4744       <div class="body">
4745         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
4746 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
4747 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
4748 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
4749 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
4750 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
4751 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
4752
4753 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
4754 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
4755 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
4756 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
4757 of this story.)</p>
4758
4759 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
4760 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
4761 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
4762 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
4763 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
4764 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
4765 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
4766 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
4767 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
4768 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
4769
4770 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
4771 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
4772 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
4773 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
4774
4775 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
4776 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
4777
4778 <p><blockquote><pre>
4779 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
4780 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
4781 </pre></blockquote></p>
4782
4783 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
4784 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
4785 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
4786 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
4787 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
4788 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
4789 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
4790 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
4791
4792 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
4793 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
4794
4795 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
4796 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
4797 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
4798 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
4799 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
4800
4801 <p><blockquote><pre>
4802 Task: isenkram-packages
4803 Section: hardware
4804 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4805  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
4806  proposed.
4807 Test-new-install: show show
4808 Relevance: 8
4809 Packages: for-current-hardware
4810
4811 Task: isenkram-firmware
4812 Section: hardware
4813 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4814  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
4815  packages are proposed.
4816 Test-new-install: mark show
4817 Relevance: 8
4818 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
4819 </pre></blockquote></p>
4820
4821 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
4822 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
4823 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
4824 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
4825 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
4826
4827 <p><blockquote><pre>
4828 #!/bin/sh
4829 #
4830 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
4831 export PATH
4832 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
4833 </pre></blockquote></p>
4834
4835 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
4836 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
4837
4838 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
4839 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
4840 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
4841 install.</p>
4842
4843 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
4844 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
4845 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
4846
4847       </div>
4848       <div class="tags">
4849
4850
4851         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
4852
4853
4854       </div>
4855     </div>
4856     <div class="padding"></div>
4857
4858     <div class="entry">
4859       <div class="title">
4860         <a href="http://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>
4861       </div>
4862       <div class="date">
4863          4th October 2014
4864       </div>
4865       <div class="body">
4866         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
4867 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
4868 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
4869 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
4870
4871 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
4872
4873 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
4874 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
4875 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
4876
4877       </div>
4878       <div class="tags">
4879
4880
4881         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>.
4882
4883
4884       </div>
4885     </div>
4886     <div class="padding"></div>
4887
4888     <div class="entry">
4889       <div class="title">
4890         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
4891       </div>
4892       <div class="date">
4893          4th October 2014
4894       </div>
4895       <div class="body">
4896         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
4897 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
4898 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
4899 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
4900 Dibb.</p>
4901
4902 <p>I just wrapped up
4903 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
4904 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
4905 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
4906 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
4907 0.17.</p>
4908
4909 <ul>
4910
4911  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
4912  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
4913    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
4914  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
4915  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
4916  <li>Fix include orders</li>
4917  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
4918  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
4919  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
4920    the palette size is the same.</li>
4921  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
4922  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
4923  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
4924  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
4925    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
4926
4927 </ul>
4928
4929 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
4930 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
4931 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
4932
4933       </div>
4934       <div class="tags">
4935
4936
4937         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/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4938
4939
4940       </div>
4941     </div>
4942     <div class="padding"></div>
4943
4944     <div class="entry">
4945       <div class="title">
4946         <a href="http://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>
4947       </div>
4948       <div class="date">
4949         26th September 2014
4950       </div>
4951       <div class="body">
4952         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4953 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
4954 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
4955 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
4956 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
4957 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
4958 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
4959 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
4960 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
4961 future.  The
4962 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
4963 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
4964 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
4965 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
4966 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
4967
4968 <p>First, download the test ISO via
4969 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
4970 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
4971 or rsync (use
4972 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
4973 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
4974 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
4975 install with some tweaking.</p>
4976
4977 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
4978 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
4979
4980 <p><blockquote><pre>
4981 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
4982 </pre></blockquote></p>
4983
4984 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
4985 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
4986 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
4987 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
4988
4989 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
4990 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
4991 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
4992 your need.</p>
4993
4994 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
4995 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
4996 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
4997 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
4998 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
4999 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
5000 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
5001 days.</p>
5002
5003 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
5004 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
5005 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
5006 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
5007 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
5008 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
5009 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
5010 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
5011 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
5012
5013 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
5014 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
5015 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
5016
5017       </div>
5018       <div class="tags">
5019
5020
5021         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5022
5023
5024       </div>
5025     </div>
5026     <div class="padding"></div>
5027
5028     <div class="entry">
5029       <div class="title">
5030         <a href="http://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>
5031       </div>
5032       <div class="date">
5033         25th September 2014
5034       </div>
5035       <div class="body">
5036         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
5037 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
5038 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
5039 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
5040 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
5041 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
5042 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
5043 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
5044 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
5045 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
5046 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
5047 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
5048 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
5049
5050 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
5051 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
5052 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
5053 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
5054 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
5055 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
5056 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
5057 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
5058 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
5059 list</a>. :)</p>
5060
5061       </div>
5062       <div class="tags">
5063
5064
5065         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/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
5066
5067
5068       </div>
5069     </div>
5070     <div class="padding"></div>
5071
5072     <div class="entry">
5073       <div class="title">
5074         <a href="http://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>
5075       </div>
5076       <div class="date">
5077         16th September 2014
5078       </div>
5079       <div class="body">
5080         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
5081 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
5082 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
5083 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
5084 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
5085 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
5086 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
5087 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
5088 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
5089 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
5090 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
5091 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
5092 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
5093 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
5094
5095 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
5096 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
5097 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
5098 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
5099 depend on the small and clever package
5100 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
5101 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
5102 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
5103 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
5104 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
5105 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
5106 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
5107 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
5108 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
5109 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
5110 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
5111
5112 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
5113 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
5114 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
5115 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
5116 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
5117 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
5118 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
5119 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
5120 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
5121 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
5122 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
5123 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
5124 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
5125 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
5126 dialog.</p>
5127
5128 <p><table>
5129
5130 <tr>
5131 <th>Machine/setup</th>
5132 <th>Original tasksel</th>
5133 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
5134 <th>Reduction</th>
5135 </tr>
5136
5137 <tr>
5138 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
5139 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
5140 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
5141 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
5142 </tr>
5143
5144 <tr>
5145 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
5146 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
5147 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
5148 <td>23 min 40%</td>
5149 </tr>
5150
5151 <tr>
5152 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
5153 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
5154 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
5155 <td>11 min 50%</td>
5156 </tr>
5157
5158 <tr>
5159 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
5160 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
5161 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
5162 <td>2 min 33%</td>
5163 </tr>
5164
5165 <tr>
5166 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
5167 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
5168 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
5169 <td>4 min 21%</td>
5170 </tr>
5171
5172 </table></p>
5173
5174 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
5175 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
5176 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
5177 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
5178 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
5179 installed.</p>
5180
5181 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
5182 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
5183 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
5184 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
5185 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
5186 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
5187 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
5188 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
5189 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
5190 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
5191 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
5192 for the entire installation.</p>
5193
5194 <p>I've implemented this in the
5195 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
5196 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
5197 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
5198 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
5199 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
5200
5201 <p><blockquote><pre>
5202 #!/bin/sh
5203 set -e
5204 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5205 info() {
5206     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
5207 }
5208 error() {
5209     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
5210 }
5211 override_install() {
5212     apt-install eatmydata || true
5213     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
5214         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5215             file=/usr/bin/$bin
5216             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
5217             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
5218                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
5219                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
5220                     > /target$file.edu
5221                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
5222                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5223                     --rename --quiet --add $file
5224                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
5225             else
5226                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
5227             fi
5228         done
5229     else
5230         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
5231     fi
5232 }
5233
5234 override_install
5235 </pre></blockquote></p>
5236
5237 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
5238 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
5239
5240 <p><blockquote><pre>
5241 #! /bin/sh -e
5242 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5243 error() {
5244     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
5245 }
5246 remove_install_override() {
5247     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5248         file=/usr/bin/$bin
5249         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
5250             rm /target$file
5251             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5252                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
5253             rm /target$file.edu
5254         else
5255             error "Missing divert for $file."
5256         fi
5257     done
5258     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
5259 }
5260
5261 remove_install_override
5262 </pre></blockquote></p>
5263
5264 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
5265 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
5266 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
5267
5268 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
5269 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
5270 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
5271 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
5272 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
5273 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
5274 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
5275 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
5276 everyone.</p>
5277
5278 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
5279 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
5280 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
5281 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
5282
5283 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
5284 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
5285 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
5286 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
5287 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
5288
5289 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
5290 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
5291 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
5292 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
5293 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
5294
5295       </div>
5296       <div class="tags">
5297
5298
5299         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5300
5301
5302       </div>
5303     </div>
5304     <div class="padding"></div>
5305
5306     <div class="entry">
5307       <div class="title">
5308         <a href="http://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>
5309       </div>
5310       <div class="date">
5311         10th September 2014
5312       </div>
5313       <div class="body">
5314         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
5315 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
5316 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
5317 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
5318 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
5319 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
5320 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
5321 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
5322 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
5323 those problems are gone now.</p>
5324
5325 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
5326 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
5327 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
5328 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
5329 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
5330
5331 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
5332 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
5333 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
5334
5335 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
5336 line:</p>
5337
5338 <p><blockquote><pre>
5339 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
5340 </pre></blockquote></p>
5341
5342 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
5343 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
5344 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
5345 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
5346
5347 <p><blockquote><pre>
5348 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
5349 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
5350 %
5351 </pre></blockquote></p>
5352
5353 <p>Now if only
5354 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
5355 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
5356 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
5357 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
5358 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
5359 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
5360 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
5361 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
5362 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
5363
5364       </div>
5365       <div class="tags">
5366
5367
5368         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5369
5370
5371       </div>
5372     </div>
5373     <div class="padding"></div>
5374
5375     <div class="entry">
5376       <div class="title">
5377         <a href="http://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>
5378       </div>
5379       <div class="date">
5380         17th June 2014
5381       </div>
5382       <div class="body">
5383         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5384 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
5385 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
5386 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
5387 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
5388
5389 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
5390 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
5391 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
5392 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
5393 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
5394 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
5395 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
5396 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
5397 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
5398 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
5399 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
5400 goals.</p>
5401
5402 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
5403 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
5404 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
5405 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
5406 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
5407 chapters together into one large web page (aka
5408 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
5409 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
5410 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
5411 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
5412 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
5413 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
5414 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
5415 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
5416 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
5417 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
5418 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
5419 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
5420 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
5421 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
5422 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
5423 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
5424 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
5425 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
5426
5427 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
5428 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
5429 track the English original.  For this we use the
5430 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
5431 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
5432 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
5433 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
5434 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
5435 files), which the translations update with the native language
5436 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
5437 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
5438 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
5439 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
5440 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
5441 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
5442 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
5443 of the documentation.</p>
5444
5445 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
5446 recommend using
5447 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
5448 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
5449 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
5450 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
5451 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
5452 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
5453 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
5454 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
5455
5456 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
5457 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
5458 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
5459 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
5460 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
5461 translated images by storing translated versions in
5462 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
5463 package maintainers know more.</p>
5464
5465 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
5466 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
5467 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
5468 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
5469 PDF version</a> or the
5470 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
5471 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
5472 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
5473
5474 <p>To learn more, check out
5475 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
5476 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
5477 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
5478 manual on the wiki</a> and
5479 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
5480 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
5481
5482       </div>
5483       <div class="tags">
5484
5485
5486         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5487
5488
5489       </div>
5490     </div>
5491     <div class="padding"></div>
5492
5493     <div class="entry">
5494       <div class="title">
5495         <a href="http://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>
5496       </div>
5497       <div class="date">
5498         23rd April 2014
5499       </div>
5500       <div class="body">
5501         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
5502 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
5503 So I implemented one, using
5504 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
5505 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
5506 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
5507 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
5508 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
5509 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
5510
5511 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
5512 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
5513 packages to install.  The first part is in
5514 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
5515 this:</p>
5516
5517 <p><blockquote><pre>
5518 Task: isenkram
5519 Section: hardware
5520 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5521  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
5522  proposed.
5523 Test-new-install: mark show
5524 Relevance: 8
5525 Packages: for-current-hardware
5526 </pre></blockquote></p>
5527
5528 <p>The second part is in
5529 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
5530 this:</p>
5531
5532 <p><blockquote><pre>
5533 #!/bin/sh
5534 #
5535 (
5536     isenkram-lookup
5537     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5538 ) | sort -u
5539 </pre></blockquote></p>
5540
5541 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
5542 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
5543 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
5544 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
5545 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
5546 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
5547
5548 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
5549 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
5550 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
5551 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
5552 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
5553 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
5554 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
5555 the python-apt code (bug
5556 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
5557 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
5558 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
5559 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
5560 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
5561 unstable today.</p>
5562
5563 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
5564 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
5565 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
5566 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
5567 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
5568 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
5569 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
5570 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
5571 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
5572
5573 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
5574 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
5575 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
5576 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
5577 package.  See also
5578 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
5579 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
5580 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
5581 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
5582
5583       </div>
5584       <div class="tags">
5585
5586
5587         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>.
5588
5589
5590       </div>
5591     </div>
5592     <div class="padding"></div>
5593
5594     <div class="entry">
5595       <div class="title">
5596         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
5597       </div>
5598       <div class="date">
5599         15th April 2014
5600       </div>
5601       <div class="body">
5602         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5603 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
5604 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
5605 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
5606 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
5607 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
5608
5609 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
5610 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
5611 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
5612 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
5613 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
5614 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
5615 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
5616
5617 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
5618 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
5619 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
5620 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
5621 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
5622 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
5623 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
5624 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
5625 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
5626 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
5627 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
5628 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
5629
5630 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
5631 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
5632 become root:</p>
5633
5634 <p><pre>
5635 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5636   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5637   u-boot-tools
5638 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5639   freedom-maker
5640 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5641 </pre></p>
5642
5643 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5644 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
5645 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
5646 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
5647 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
5648 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
5649 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
5650 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
5651
5652 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5653 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5654 the preseed values:</p>
5655
5656 <p><pre>
5657 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5658 </pre></p>
5659
5660 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
5661 it still work.</p>
5662
5663 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
5664 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
5665 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
5666 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
5667 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
5668 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
5669 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
5670
5671 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5672 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5673 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5674 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5675 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5676 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5677
5678       </div>
5679       <div class="tags">
5680
5681
5682         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5683
5684
5685       </div>
5686     </div>
5687     <div class="padding"></div>
5688
5689     <div class="entry">
5690       <div class="title">
5691         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
5692       </div>
5693       <div class="date">
5694          9th April 2014
5695       </div>
5696       <div class="body">
5697         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
5698 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
5699 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
5700 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
5701 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
5702 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
5703 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
5704 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
5705 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
5706 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
5707 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
5708 have looked at a system called
5709 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
5710 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
5711
5712 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
5713 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
5714 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
5715 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
5716 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
5717 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
5718 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
5719 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
5720 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
5721 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
5722 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
5723 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
5724 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
5725
5726 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
5727 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
5728 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
5729 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
5730 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
5731 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
5732 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
5733 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
5734 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
5735 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
5736 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
5737 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
5738 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
5739 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
5740 account.</p>
5741
5742 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
5743 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
5744 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
5745 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
5746 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
5747 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
5748 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
5749
5750 <p><blockquote><pre>
5751 [s3c]
5752 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5753 backend-login: API-login
5754 backend-password: API-password
5755 fs-passphrase: local-password
5756 </pre></blockquote></p>
5757
5758 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
5759 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
5760 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
5761 details and password to create it:</p>
5762
5763 <p><blockquote><pre>
5764 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
5765 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5766   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5767 Enter backend login:
5768 Enter backend password:
5769 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
5770 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
5771 Enter encryption password:
5772 Confirm encryption password:
5773 Generating random encryption key...
5774 Creating metadata tables...
5775 Dumping metadata...
5776 ..objects..
5777 ..blocks..
5778 ..inodes..
5779 ..inode_blocks..
5780 ..symlink_targets..
5781 ..names..
5782 ..contents..
5783 ..ext_attributes..
5784 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5785 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
5786 # </pre></blockquote></p>
5787
5788 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
5789
5790 <p><blockquote><pre>
5791 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5792   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5793 Using 4 upload threads.
5794 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
5795 Reading metadata...
5796 ..objects..
5797 ..blocks..
5798 ..inodes..
5799 ..inode_blocks..
5800 ..symlink_targets..
5801 ..names..
5802 ..contents..
5803 ..ext_attributes..
5804 Mounting filesystem...
5805 # df -h /s3ql
5806 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
5807 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
5808 #
5809 </pre></blockquote></p>
5810
5811 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
5812 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
5813 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
5814 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
5815 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
5816 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
5817
5818 <p><blockquote><pre>
5819 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
5820 #
5821 </pre></blockquote></p>
5822
5823 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
5824 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
5825 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
5826 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
5827 file system:</p>
5828
5829 <p><blockquote><pre>
5830 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5831 Using cached metadata.
5832 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
5833 Checking DB integrity...
5834 Creating temporary extra indices...
5835 Checking lost+found...
5836 Checking cached objects...
5837 Checking names (refcounts)...
5838 Checking contents (names)...
5839 Checking contents (inodes)...
5840 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
5841 Checking objects (reference counts)...
5842 Checking objects (backend)...
5843 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
5844 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
5845 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
5846 Checking objects (sizes)...
5847 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
5848 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
5849 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
5850 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
5851 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
5852 Checking inodes (sizes)...
5853 Checking extended attributes (names)...
5854 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
5855 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
5856 Checking directory reachability...
5857 Checking unix conventions...
5858 Checking referential integrity...
5859 Dropping temporary indices...
5860 Backing up old metadata...
5861 Dumping metadata...
5862 ..objects..
5863 ..blocks..
5864 ..inodes..
5865 ..inode_blocks..
5866 ..symlink_targets..
5867 ..names..
5868 ..contents..
5869 ..ext_attributes..
5870 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5871 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
5872 #
5873 </pre></blockquote></p>
5874
5875 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
5876 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
5877 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
5878 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
5879 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
5880 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
5881 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
5882 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
5883 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
5884 working set.</p>
5885
5886 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
5887 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
5888 busy:</p>
5889
5890 <p><blockquote><pre>
5891 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5892   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5893 Using 8 upload threads.
5894 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
5895 #
5896 </pre></blockquote></p>
5897
5898 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
5899 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
5900 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
5901 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
5902 s3qlctrl:
5903
5904 <p><blockquote><pre>
5905 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
5906 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
5907 #
5908 </pre></blockquote></p>
5909
5910 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
5911 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
5912 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
5913 a report:</p>
5914
5915 <p><blockquote><pre>
5916 # s3qlstat /s3ql
5917 Directory entries:    9141
5918 Inodes:               9143
5919 Data blocks:          8851
5920 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
5921 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
5922 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
5923 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
5924 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
5925 #
5926 </pre></blockquote></p>
5927
5928 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
5929 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
5930 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
5931 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
5932 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
5933 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
5934 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
5935 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
5936 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
5937 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
5938 best.</p>
5939
5940 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
5941 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
5942 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
5943 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
5944 poster is titled
5945 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
5946 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
5947 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
5948 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
5949 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
5950
5951 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
5952 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
5953 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
5954 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
5955 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
5956 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
5957 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
5958 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
5959
5960 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
5961 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
5962 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
5963 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
5964 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
5965 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
5966 only read from it.</p>
5967
5968 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5969 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5970 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5971
5972       </div>
5973       <div class="tags">
5974
5975
5976         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5977
5978
5979       </div>
5980     </div>
5981     <div class="padding"></div>
5982
5983     <div class="entry">
5984       <div class="title">
5985         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
5986       </div>
5987       <div class="date">
5988         14th March 2014
5989       </div>
5990       <div class="body">
5991         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5992 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
5993 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
5994 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
5995 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
5996 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
5997 release (0.2).</p>
5998
5999 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
6000 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
6001 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
6002 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
6003 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
6004 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
6005 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
6006 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
6007 and build using
6008 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
6009 with a user with sudo access to become root:
6010
6011 <pre>
6012 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
6013   freedom-maker
6014 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
6015   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
6016   u-boot-tools
6017 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
6018 </pre>
6019
6020 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
6021 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
6022 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
6023 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
6024 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
6025 kpartx call.</p>
6026
6027 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
6028 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
6029 the preseed values:</p>
6030
6031 <pre>
6032 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
6033 </pre>
6034
6035 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
6036 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
6037 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
6038 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
6039 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
6040 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
6041
6042 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
6043 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
6044 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
6045 irc.debian.org)</a> and
6046 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6047 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6048
6049       </div>
6050       <div class="tags">
6051
6052
6053         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6054
6055
6056       </div>
6057     </div>
6058     <div class="padding"></div>
6059
6060     <div class="entry">
6061       <div class="title">
6062         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
6063       </div>
6064       <div class="date">
6065         22nd February 2014
6066       </div>
6067       <div class="body">
6068         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
6069 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
6070 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
6071 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
6072 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
6073 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
6074 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
6075 proper home since then.</p>
6076
6077 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
6078 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
6079 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
6080 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
6081 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
6082
6083 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
6084 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
6085 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
6086 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
6087 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
6088 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
6089 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
6090 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
6091 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
6092
6093       </div>
6094       <div class="tags">
6095
6096
6097         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>.
6098
6099
6100       </div>
6101     </div>
6102     <div class="padding"></div>
6103
6104     <div class="entry">
6105       <div class="title">
6106         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
6107       </div>
6108       <div class="date">
6109          3rd February 2014
6110       </div>
6111       <div class="body">
6112         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
6113 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
6114 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
6115 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
6116 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
6117 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
6118 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
6119 <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>,
6120 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
6121
6122 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
6123 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
6124 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
6125 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
6126 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
6127 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
6128
6129 <p><blockquote><pre>
6130 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
6131 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
6132 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
6133 dhclient /dev/eth0
6134 </pre></blockquote></p>
6135
6136 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
6137 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
6138 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
6139
6140 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
6141 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
6142 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
6143 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
6144 side.</p>
6145
6146 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
6147 stuff:</p>
6148
6149 <p><blockquote><pre>
6150 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
6151 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
6152 EOF
6153 apt-get update
6154 apt-get dist-upgrade
6155 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
6156     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
6157 update-alternatives --config runsystem
6158 </pre></blockquote></p>
6159
6160 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
6161 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
6162 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
6163 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
6164 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
6165 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
6166 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
6167 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
6168 ssh instead.
6169
6170 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
6171 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
6172 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
6173 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
6174 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
6175 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
6176
6177 <p><blockquote><pre>
6178 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
6179 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
6180 EOF
6181 </pre></blockquote></p>
6182
6183 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
6184 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
6185 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
6186 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
6187
6188 <p><blockquote><pre>
6189 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
6190 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
6191 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
6192 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
6193 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
6194 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
6195 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
6196 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
6197 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
6198 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
6199 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
6200 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
6201 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
6202 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
6203 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
6204 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
6205 #
6206 </pre></blockquote></p>
6207
6208 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
6209 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
6210 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
6211 command line stuff.<p>
6212
6213       </div>
6214       <div class="tags">
6215
6216
6217         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6218
6219
6220       </div>
6221     </div>
6222     <div class="padding"></div>
6223
6224     <div class="entry">
6225       <div class="title">
6226         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
6227       </div>
6228       <div class="date">
6229         14th January 2014
6230       </div>
6231       <div class="body">
6232         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
6233 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
6234 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
6235 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
6236 the source.  The company behind it provide
6237 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
6238 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
6239 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
6240 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
6241 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
6242 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
6243 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
6244 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
6245 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
6246 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
6247 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
6248 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
6249 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
6250 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
6251 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
6252 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
6253 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
6254 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
6255 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
6256
6257 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
6258
6259 <ul>
6260
6261   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
6262   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
6263   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
6264
6265 </ul>
6266
6267 <p>You can
6268 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6269 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6270 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6271 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6272 include a test suite check.</p>
6273
6274       </div>
6275       <div class="tags">
6276
6277
6278         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6279
6280
6281       </div>
6282     </div>
6283     <div class="padding"></div>
6284
6285     <div class="entry">
6286       <div class="title">
6287         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
6288       </div>
6289       <div class="date">
6290         24th November 2013
6291       </div>
6292       <div class="body">
6293         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
6294 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
6295 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
6296 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
6297 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
6298 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
6299 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
6300 is working on.  I checked the
6301 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
6302 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
6303 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
6304 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
6305 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
6306 These are the release notes:</p>
6307
6308 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
6309
6310 <ul>
6311
6312   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
6313    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
6314    up.</li>
6315
6316   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
6317
6318   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
6319    Matthias Klose.</li>
6320
6321   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
6322    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
6323
6324   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
6325    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
6326    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
6327
6328 </ul>
6329
6330 <p>You can
6331 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6332 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6333 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6334 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6335 include a testsuite check.</p>
6336
6337       </div>
6338       <div class="tags">
6339
6340
6341         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6342
6343
6344       </div>
6345     </div>
6346     <div class="padding"></div>
6347
6348     <div class="entry">
6349       <div class="title">
6350         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
6351       </div>
6352       <div class="date">
6353          2nd November 2013
6354       </div>
6355       <div class="body">
6356         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
6357 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
6358 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
6359 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
6360 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
6361
6362 <p><pre>
6363 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
6364 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
6365 # Provides:          rsyslog
6366 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
6367 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
6368 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
6369 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
6370 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
6371 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
6372 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
6373 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
6374 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
6375 ### END INIT INFO
6376 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
6377 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
6378 </pre></p>
6379
6380 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
6381 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
6382 info/comments.</p>
6383
6384 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
6385 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
6386
6387 <p><pre>
6388 #!/bin/sh
6389
6390 # Define LSB log_* functions.
6391 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
6392 # and status_of_proc is working.
6393 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
6394
6395 #
6396 # Function that starts the daemon/service
6397
6398 #
6399 do_start()
6400 {
6401         # Return
6402         #   0 if daemon has been started
6403         #   1 if daemon was already running
6404         #   2 if daemon could not be started
6405         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
6406                 || return 1
6407         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
6408                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
6409                 || return 2
6410         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
6411         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
6412         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
6413 }
6414
6415 #
6416 # Function that stops the daemon/service
6417 #
6418 do_stop()
6419 {
6420         # Return
6421         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
6422         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
6423         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
6424         #   other if a failure occurred
6425         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6426         RETVAL="$?"
6427         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
6428         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
6429         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
6430         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
6431         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
6432         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
6433         # sleep for some time.
6434         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
6435         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
6436         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
6437         rm -f $PIDFILE
6438         return "$RETVAL"
6439 }
6440
6441 #
6442 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
6443 #
6444 do_reload() {
6445         #
6446         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
6447         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
6448         # then implement that here.
6449         #
6450         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6451         return 0
6452 }
6453
6454 SCRIPTNAME=$1
6455 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
6456 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
6457 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
6458     script="$1"
6459     shift
6460     . $script
6461 else
6462     exit 0
6463 fi
6464
6465 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
6466 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
6467
6468 # Exit if the package is not installed
6469 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
6470
6471 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
6472 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
6473
6474 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
6475 . /lib/init/vars.sh
6476
6477 case "$1" in
6478   start)
6479         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
6480         do_start
6481         case "$?" in
6482                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6483                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6484         esac
6485         ;;
6486   stop)
6487         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
6488         do_stop
6489         case "$?" in
6490                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6491                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6492         esac
6493         ;;
6494   status)
6495         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
6496         ;;
6497   #reload|force-reload)
6498         #
6499         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
6500         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
6501         #
6502         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
6503         #do_reload
6504         #log_end_msg $?
6505         #;;
6506   restart|force-reload)
6507         #
6508         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
6509         # 'force-reload' alias
6510         #
6511         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
6512         do_stop
6513         case "$?" in
6514           0|1)
6515                 do_start
6516                 case "$?" in
6517                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
6518                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
6519                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
6520                 esac
6521                 ;;
6522           *)
6523                 # Failed to stop
6524                 log_end_msg 1
6525                 ;;
6526         esac
6527         ;;
6528   *)
6529         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
6530         exit 3
6531         ;;
6532 esac
6533
6534 :
6535 </pre></p>
6536
6537 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
6538 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
6539 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
6540 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
6541
6542 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
6543 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
6544 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
6545 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
6546 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
6547
6548       </div>
6549       <div class="tags">
6550
6551
6552         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6553
6554
6555       </div>
6556     </div>
6557     <div class="padding"></div>
6558
6559     <div class="entry">
6560       <div class="title">
6561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
6562       </div>
6563       <div class="date">
6564          1st November 2013
6565       </div>
6566       <div class="body">
6567         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
6568 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
6569 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
6570 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
6571 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
6572 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
6573 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
6574 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
6575 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
6576 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
6577 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
6578 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
6579
6580 <p>The source is now available from
6581 <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>
6582
6583       </div>
6584       <div class="tags">
6585
6586
6587         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>.
6588
6589
6590       </div>
6591     </div>
6592     <div class="padding"></div>
6593
6594     <div class="entry">
6595       <div class="title">
6596         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
6597       </div>
6598       <div class="date">
6599         27th October 2013
6600       </div>
6601       <div class="body">
6602         <p>The
6603 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
6604 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
6605 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
6606 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
6607 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
6608 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
6609 of a plan to simplify the build system for
6610 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
6611 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
6612 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
6613 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
6614 Raspberry Pi.</p>
6615
6616 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
6617 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
6618 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
6619 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
6620 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
6621 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
6622 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
6623 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
6624 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
6625 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
6626 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
6627 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
6628 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
6629 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
6630 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
6631 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
6632 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
6633 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
6634 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
6635 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
6636 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
6637 available from
6638 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
6639 upstream project page</a>.</p>
6640
6641 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
6642 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
6643 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
6644 list:</p>
6645
6646 <p><pre>
6647 #!/bin/sh
6648 set -e # Exit on first error
6649 rootdir="$1"
6650 cd "$rootdir"
6651 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
6652 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
6653 EOF
6654 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
6655 # install a kernel somewhere too.
6656 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
6657     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6658 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6659 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
6660 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
6661 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
6662 </pre></p>
6663
6664 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
6665 to build the image:</p>
6666
6667 <pre>
6668 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
6669     --variant minbase \
6670     --arch armel \
6671     --distribution jessie \
6672     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
6673     --image test.img \
6674     --size 600M \
6675     --bootsize 64M \
6676     --boottype vfat \
6677     --log-level debug \
6678     --verbose \
6679     --no-kernel \
6680     --no-extlinux \
6681     --root-password raspberry \
6682     --hostname raspberrypi \
6683     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
6684     --customize `pwd`/customize \
6685     --package netbase \
6686     --package git-core \
6687     --package binutils \
6688     --package ca-certificates \
6689     --package wget \
6690     --package kmod
6691 </pre></p>
6692
6693 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
6694 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
6695 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
6696 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
6697 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
6698 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
6699 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
6700
6701 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
6702 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
6703 build dependency list.</p>
6704
6705 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
6706 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
6707 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
6708 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
6709
6710       </div>
6711       <div class="tags">
6712
6713
6714         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
6715
6716
6717       </div>
6718     </div>
6719     <div class="padding"></div>
6720
6721     <div class="entry">
6722       <div class="title">
6723         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
6724       </div>
6725       <div class="date">
6726         15th October 2013
6727       </div>
6728       <div class="body">
6729         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
6730 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
6731 these. :)</p>
6732
6733 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
6734 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
6735 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
6736 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
6737 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
6738 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
6739 hope you will to. :)</p>
6740
6741 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
6742 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
6743 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
6744 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
6745 donated.  Are you next?</p>
6746
6747 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
6748 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
6749 statement under the heading
6750 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
6751 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
6752 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
6753 too.</p>
6754
6755       </div>
6756       <div class="tags">
6757
6758
6759         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6760
6761
6762       </div>
6763     </div>
6764     <div class="padding"></div>
6765
6766     <div class="entry">
6767       <div class="title">
6768         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
6769       </div>
6770       <div class="date">
6771         27th September 2013
6772       </div>
6773       <div class="body">
6774         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
6775 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
6776 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
6777 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
6778
6779 <ul>
6780
6781 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
6782 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
6783
6784 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
6785 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6786
6787 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
6788 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
6789 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
6790 (Youtube)</li>
6791
6792 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
6793 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
6794
6795 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
6796 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6797
6798 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
6799 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
6800 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
6801
6802 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
6803 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
6804 (Youtube)</li>
6805
6806 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
6807 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
6808
6809 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
6810 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
6811
6812 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
6813 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
6814 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
6815
6816 </ul>
6817
6818 <p>A larger list is available from
6819 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
6820 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
6821
6822 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
6823 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
6824 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
6825 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
6826 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
6827 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
6828 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
6829 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
6830 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
6831 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6832 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6833
6834       </div>
6835       <div class="tags">
6836
6837
6838         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6839
6840
6841       </div>
6842     </div>
6843     <div class="padding"></div>
6844
6845     <div class="entry">
6846       <div class="title">
6847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
6848       </div>
6849       <div class="date">
6850         10th September 2013
6851       </div>
6852       <div class="body">
6853         <p>I was introduced to the
6854 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
6855 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
6856 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
6857 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
6858 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
6859 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
6860 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
6861 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
6862
6863 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
6864 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
6865 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
6866 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
6867 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
6868
6869 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
6870 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
6871 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
6872 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
6873 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
6874 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
6875 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
6876 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
6877 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
6878 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
6879 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
6880 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
6881 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
6882 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
6883 missing in Debian).</p>
6884
6885 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
6886 scripts
6887 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
6888 and a administrative web interface
6889 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
6890 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
6891 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
6892 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
6893 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
6894 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
6895 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
6896 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
6897 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
6898 this is really working yet, see
6899 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
6900 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
6901 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
6902 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
6903 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
6904 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
6905 with lots of half baked features.</p>
6906
6907 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
6908 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
6909 at.</p>
6910
6911 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
6912
6913 <ol>
6914
6915 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
6916 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
6917 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
6918 to the Debian installer:<p>
6919 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
6920
6921 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
6922 install on.</li>
6923
6924 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
6925 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
6926
6927 </ol>
6928
6929 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
6930
6931 <ol>
6932
6933 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
6934 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
6935 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
6936 <pre>
6937 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
6938 </pre></li>
6939 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
6940 <pre>
6941 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
6942    apt-key add -
6943 apt-get update
6944 apt-get install freedombox-setup
6945 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
6946 </pre></li>
6947 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
6948
6949 </ol>
6950
6951 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
6952 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
6953 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
6954 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
6955 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
6956
6957 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
6958 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
6959 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
6960 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
6961
6962 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
6963 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
6964 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
6965 irc.debian.org and the
6966 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
6967 mailing list</a>.</p>
6968
6969 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
6970 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
6971 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
6972 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
6973 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
6974 default password is 'secret'.</p>
6975
6976       </div>
6977       <div class="tags">
6978
6979
6980         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6981
6982
6983       </div>
6984     </div>
6985     <div class="padding"></div>
6986
6987     <div class="entry">
6988       <div class="title">
6989         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
6990       </div>
6991       <div class="date">
6992         18th August 2013
6993       </div>
6994       <div class="body">
6995         <p>Earlier, I reported about
6996 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
6997 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
6998 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
6999 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
7000 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
7001 currently on the disk.</p>
7002
7003 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
7004 <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>
7005 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
7006 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
7007 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
7008 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
7009 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
7010 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
7011 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
7012 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
7013 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
7014 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
7015 the broken disks.</p>
7016
7017       </div>
7018       <div class="tags">
7019
7020
7021         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>.
7022
7023
7024       </div>
7025     </div>
7026     <div class="padding"></div>
7027
7028     <div class="entry">
7029       <div class="title">
7030         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
7031       </div>
7032       <div class="date">
7033         17th July 2013
7034       </div>
7035       <div class="body">
7036         <p>Today I switched to
7037 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
7038 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
7039 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
7040 <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
7041 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
7042 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
7043 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
7044 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
7045 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
7046 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
7047 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
7048 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
7049 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
7050 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
7051 station from now on.</p>
7052
7053 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
7054 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
7055 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
7056 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
7057 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
7058 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
7059 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
7060 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
7061 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
7062 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
7063 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
7064 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
7065
7066 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
7067 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
7068 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
7069 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
7070 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
7071 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
7072 parameters are tuned:</p>
7073
7074 <ul>
7075
7076 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
7077     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
7078
7079 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
7080     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
7081     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
7082
7083 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
7084     systems.</li>
7085
7086 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
7087     /etc/fstab.</li>
7088
7089 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
7090
7091 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
7092     cron.daily).</li>
7093
7094 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
7095     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
7096
7097 </ul>
7098
7099 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
7100 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
7101 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
7102 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
7103 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
7104 from getting the data on the disk (see
7105 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
7106 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
7107 right thing to do.</p>
7108
7109 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
7110 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
7111 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
7112
7113 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
7114 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
7115 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
7116 instead of during my work.</p>
7117
7118 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
7119 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
7120
7121 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
7122 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
7123 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
7124
7125 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
7126 there.</p>
7127
7128 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
7129 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
7130 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
7131 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
7132 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
7133 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
7134 back.</p>
7135
7136       </div>
7137       <div class="tags">
7138
7139
7140         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>.
7141
7142
7143       </div>
7144     </div>
7145     <div class="padding"></div>
7146
7147     <div class="entry">
7148       <div class="title">
7149         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
7150       </div>
7151       <div class="date">
7152         10th July 2013
7153       </div>
7154       <div class="body">
7155         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
7156 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
7157 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
7158 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
7159 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
7160 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
7161 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
7162 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
7163
7164 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
7165 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
7166 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
7167 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
7168 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
7169 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
7170 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
7171 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
7172 lock up when I download a new
7173 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
7174 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
7175 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
7176
7177 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
7178 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
7179 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
7180 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
7181 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
7182 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
7183
7184 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
7185 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
7186 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
7187 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
7188 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
7189 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
7190
7191 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
7192 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
7193 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
7194 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
7195 exist).</p>
7196
7197       </div>
7198       <div class="tags">
7199
7200
7201         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>.
7202
7203
7204       </div>
7205     </div>
7206     <div class="padding"></div>
7207
7208     <div class="entry">
7209       <div class="title">
7210         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
7211       </div>
7212       <div class="date">
7213          9th July 2013
7214       </div>
7215       <div class="body">
7216         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
7217 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
7218 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
7219 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
7220 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7221 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
7222 Bitraf</a>.</p>
7223
7224 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
7225 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
7226 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
7227 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
7228 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
7229
7230       </div>
7231       <div class="tags">
7232
7233
7234         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7235
7236
7237       </div>
7238     </div>
7239     <div class="padding"></div>
7240
7241     <div class="entry">
7242       <div class="title">
7243         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
7244       </div>
7245       <div class="date">
7246          5th July 2013
7247       </div>
7248       <div class="body">
7249         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
7250 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
7251 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
7252 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
7253 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
7254 ended up picking a
7255 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
7256 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
7257 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
7258 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
7259 on that below.</p>
7260
7261 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7262 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7263 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7264 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7265 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7266 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
7267 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
7268 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
7269 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
7270
7271 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
7272 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
7273 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
7274 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
7275 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
7276 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
7277 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
7278
7279 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
7280 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
7281
7282 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
7283 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
7284 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
7285 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
7286 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
7287 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
7288 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
7289 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
7290 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
7291 kernel developers as
7292 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
7293 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
7294 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
7295 Lenovo forums, both for
7296 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
7297 2012-11-10</a> and for
7298 <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
7299 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
7300 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
7301 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
7302 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
7303 There is even a
7304 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
7305 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
7306 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
7307
7308 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
7309 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
7310 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
7311 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
7312 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
7313 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
7314 fixed. :)</p>
7315
7316       </div>
7317       <div class="tags">
7318
7319
7320         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>.
7321
7322
7323       </div>
7324     </div>
7325     <div class="padding"></div>
7326
7327     <div class="entry">
7328       <div class="title">
7329         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
7330       </div>
7331       <div class="date">
7332          4th July 2013
7333       </div>
7334       <div class="body">
7335         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
7336 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
7337 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
7338 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
7339 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
7340 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
7341 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
7342 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
7343 with an expencive door stop.</p>
7344
7345 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7346 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7347 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7348 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7349 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7350 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
7351 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
7352
7353 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
7354 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
7355 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
7356 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
7357 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
7358 new laptop now. :)</p>
7359
7360 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
7361
7362       </div>
7363       <div class="tags">
7364
7365
7366         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>.
7367
7368
7369       </div>
7370     </div>
7371     <div class="padding"></div>
7372
7373     <div class="entry">
7374       <div class="title">
7375         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
7376       </div>
7377       <div class="date">
7378         25th June 2013
7379       </div>
7380       <div class="body">
7381         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
7382 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
7383 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
7384 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
7385 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
7386 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
7387 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
7388 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
7389 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
7390 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
7391 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
7392
7393 <p><pre>
7394 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7395 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
7396 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
7397 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
7398 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
7399 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
7400 firmware-ipw2x00
7401 firmware-ipw2x00
7402 Preconfiguring packages ...
7403 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
7404 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
7405 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
7406 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
7407 #
7408 </pre></p>
7409
7410 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
7411 printed instead:</p>
7412
7413 <p><pre>
7414 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7415 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
7416 #
7417 </pre></p>
7418
7419 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
7420 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
7421
7422 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
7423 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
7424 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
7425 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
7426 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
7427 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
7428 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
7429 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
7430 machine.</p>
7431
7432 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
7433 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
7434 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
7435 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
7436 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
7437 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
7438
7439       </div>
7440       <div class="tags">
7441
7442
7443         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>.
7444
7445
7446       </div>
7447     </div>
7448     <div class="padding"></div>
7449
7450     <div class="entry">
7451       <div class="title">
7452         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
7453       </div>
7454       <div class="date">
7455         11th June 2013
7456       </div>
7457       <div class="body">
7458         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
7459 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
7460 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
7461 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
7462 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
7463 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
7464 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
7465 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
7466 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
7467 i915 driver used by the
7468 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7469 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
7470
7471 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
7472 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
7473 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
7474 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
7475 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
7476
7477 <pre>
7478 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
7479 update-initramfs -u -k all
7480 </pre>
7481
7482 <p>Since March 2012 there is
7483 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
7484 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
7485 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
7486 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
7487 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
7488 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
7489 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
7490 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
7491 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
7492 number.</p>
7493
7494 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
7495 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
7496
7497 <p><pre>
7498 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
7499     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
7500     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
7501  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
7502  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
7503     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
7504  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
7505     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
7506  Latency: 0
7507  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
7508  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
7509  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
7510  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
7511  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
7512  Capabilities: <access denied>
7513  Kernel driver in use: i915
7514 </pre></p>
7515
7516 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
7517
7518 <p><pre>
7519 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
7520        ...
7521         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
7522         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
7523        ...
7524 }
7525 </pre></p>
7526
7527 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
7528 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
7529 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
7530 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
7531 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
7532 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
7533 yet shown up in
7534 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
7535 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
7536 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
7537 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
7538 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
7539 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
7540
7541 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
7542 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
7543 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
7544 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
7545 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
7546 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
7547 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
7548 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
7549 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
7550 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
7551 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
7552 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
7553
7554 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
7555 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
7556 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
7557 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
7558 backlight.</p>
7559
7560       </div>
7561       <div class="tags">
7562
7563
7564         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>.
7565
7566
7567       </div>
7568     </div>
7569     <div class="padding"></div>
7570
7571     <div class="entry">
7572       <div class="title">
7573         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
7574       </div>
7575       <div class="date">
7576         27th May 2013
7577       </div>
7578       <div class="body">
7579         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7580 <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
7581 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7582 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7583 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7584 and Windows 8.</p>
7585
7586 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7587 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7588 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7589 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7590 enough to tell.</p>
7591
7592 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7593 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7594 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7595 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7596 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7597 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7598 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7599 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7600 to follow.</p>
7601
7602 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7603 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7604 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7605 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7606 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7607 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7608 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7609 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7610
7611 <p>I've updated the
7612 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7613 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7614 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7615 machine.</p>
7616
7617 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7618 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7619
7620       </div>
7621       <div class="tags">
7622
7623
7624         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>.
7625
7626
7627       </div>
7628     </div>
7629     <div class="padding"></div>
7630
7631     <div class="entry">
7632       <div class="title">
7633         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
7634       </div>
7635       <div class="date">
7636         25th May 2013
7637       </div>
7638       <div class="body">
7639         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7640 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7641 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7642 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7643 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7644 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7645
7646 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7647 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7648 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7649 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7650 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7651 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7652 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7653 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7654 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7655 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7656
7657 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7658 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7659 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7660 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7661 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7662 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7663
7664 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7665 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7666 on new Laptops?</p>
7667
7668       </div>
7669       <div class="tags">
7670
7671
7672         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>.
7673
7674
7675       </div>
7676     </div>
7677     <div class="padding"></div>
7678
7679     <div class="entry">
7680       <div class="title">
7681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
7682       </div>
7683       <div class="date">
7684         17th May 2013
7685       </div>
7686       <div class="body">
7687         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7688 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7689 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7690 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7691 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7692 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7693 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7694 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7695 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7696 donate some money</a>.
7697
7698 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7699 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7700 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7701 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7702 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7703
7704 <p>The script,
7705 <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/>
7706 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7707 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7708 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7709
7710 <ol>
7711
7712 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7713 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7714 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7715     our configuration.</li>
7716 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7717     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7718     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7719     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7720 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7721     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7722 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7723
7724 </ol>
7725
7726 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7727 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7728 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7729 the needed packages.</p>
7730
7731 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7732 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7733 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7734 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7735 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7736 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7737
7738 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7739 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7740 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7741
7742 <p><pre>
7743 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7744 DESKTOP="lxde"
7745 </pre></p>
7746
7747 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7748 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7749 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7750 boot.</p>
7751
7752       </div>
7753       <div class="tags">
7754
7755
7756         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7757
7758
7759       </div>
7760     </div>
7761     <div class="padding"></div>
7762
7763     <div class="entry">
7764       <div class="title">
7765         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
7766       </div>
7767       <div class="date">
7768         11th May 2013
7769       </div>
7770       <div class="body">
7771         <P>In January,
7772 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7773 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7774 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7775 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7776 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7777 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7778 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7779 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7780 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7781 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7782 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7783 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7784
7785 <p><table>
7786 <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>
7787 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7788 <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>
7789 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7790 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7791 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7792 <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>
7793 <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>
7794 <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>
7795 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7796 </table></p>
7797
7798 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7799 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7800 available in experimental.</p>
7801
7802 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7803 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7804 for LEGO designers.</p>
7805
7806       </div>
7807       <div class="tags">
7808
7809
7810         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/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
7811
7812
7813       </div>
7814     </div>
7815     <div class="padding"></div>
7816
7817     <div class="entry">
7818       <div class="title">
7819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
7820       </div>
7821       <div class="date">
7822          5th May 2013
7823       </div>
7824       <div class="body">
7825         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7826 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7827 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7828 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7829 soon.</p>
7830
7831 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7832 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7833 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7834 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7835 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7836 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7837 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7838 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7839 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7840 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7841 Edu.</a>
7842
7843 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7844 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7845 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7846 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7847 follow.<p>
7848
7849       </div>
7850       <div class="tags">
7851
7852
7853         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7854
7855
7856       </div>
7857     </div>
7858     <div class="padding"></div>
7859
7860     <div class="entry">
7861       <div class="title">
7862         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
7863       </div>
7864       <div class="date">
7865          3rd April 2013
7866       </div>
7867       <div class="body">
7868         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
7869 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
7870 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
7871 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
7872
7873 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
7874 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
7875 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
7876 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
7877 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
7878 BTS. :)</p>
7879
7880       </div>
7881       <div class="tags">
7882
7883
7884         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>.
7885
7886
7887       </div>
7888     </div>
7889     <div class="padding"></div>
7890
7891     <div class="entry">
7892       <div class="title">
7893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
7894       </div>
7895       <div class="date">
7896          2nd February 2013
7897       </div>
7898       <div class="body">
7899         <p>My
7900 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
7901 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
7902 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
7903 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
7904 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
7905 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
7906 version too.</p>
7907
7908 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
7909 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
7910 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
7911 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
7912 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
7913 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
7914 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
7915 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
7916
7917 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
7918 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
7919 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
7920 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
7921 it. :)</p>
7922
7923 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7924 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7925 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7926
7927       </div>
7928       <div class="tags">
7929
7930
7931         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7932
7933
7934       </div>
7935     </div>
7936     <div class="padding"></div>
7937
7938     <div class="entry">
7939       <div class="title">
7940         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
7941       </div>
7942       <div class="date">
7943         22nd January 2013
7944       </div>
7945       <div class="body">
7946         <p>Yesterday, I
7947 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
7948 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
7949 pluggable hardware devices, which I
7950 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
7951 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
7952 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
7953 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
7954 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
7955 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
7956 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
7957 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
7958 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
7959 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
7960
7961 <pre>
7962 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
7963 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
7964 </pre>
7965
7966 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
7967 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
7968 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
7969 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
7970
7971 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
7972 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
7973 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
7974 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
7975 word.</p>
7976
7977 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
7978 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
7979 process.</p>
7980
7981 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
7982 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
7983
7984       </div>
7985       <div class="tags">
7986
7987
7988         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>.
7989
7990
7991       </div>
7992     </div>
7993     <div class="padding"></div>
7994
7995     <div class="entry">
7996       <div class="title">
7997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
7998       </div>
7999       <div class="date">
8000         21st January 2013
8001       </div>
8002       <div class="body">
8003         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
8004 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
8005 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
8006 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
8007 it, fetch the
8008 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
8009 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
8010 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
8011 autostart script.</p>
8012
8013 <p>The design is simple:</p>
8014
8015 <ul>
8016
8017 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
8018 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
8019
8020 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
8021 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
8022 initially did.</li>
8023
8024 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
8025 the APT database, a database
8026 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
8027 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
8028
8029 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
8030 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
8031 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
8032 package or packages.</li>
8033
8034 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
8035 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
8036
8037 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
8038 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
8039
8040 </ul>
8041
8042 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
8043 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
8044 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
8045 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
8046
8047 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
8048 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
8049 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
8050 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
8051 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
8052
8053 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
8054 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
8055 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
8056 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
8057 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
8058 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
8059 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
8060 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
8061
8062 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
8063 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
8064 '<tt>svn checkout
8065 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
8066 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
8067 devscripts package.</p>
8068
8069 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
8070 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
8071 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
8072 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
8073 instructions</a> for details.</p>
8074
8075       </div>
8076       <div class="tags">
8077
8078
8079         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>.
8080
8081
8082       </div>
8083     </div>
8084     <div class="padding"></div>
8085
8086     <div class="entry">
8087       <div class="title">
8088         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
8089       </div>
8090       <div class="date">
8091         19th January 2013
8092       </div>
8093       <div class="body">
8094         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
8095 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
8096 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
8097 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
8098 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
8099 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
8100 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
8101 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
8102 not a durable solution.
8103
8104 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
8105 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
8106
8107 <ul>
8108
8109 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
8110   than A4).</li>
8111 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
8112 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
8113 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
8114 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
8115 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
8116 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
8117 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
8118 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
8119 size).</li>
8120 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
8121   X.org packages.</li>
8122 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
8123   the time).
8124
8125 </ul>
8126
8127 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
8128 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
8129 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
8130 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
8131 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
8132 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
8133 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
8134 still be useful.</p>
8135
8136 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
8137 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
8138 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
8139 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
8140 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
8141 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
8142
8143       </div>
8144       <div class="tags">
8145
8146
8147         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>.
8148
8149
8150       </div>
8151     </div>
8152     <div class="padding"></div>
8153
8154     <div class="entry">
8155       <div class="title">
8156         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
8157       </div>
8158       <div class="date">
8159         18th January 2013
8160       </div>
8161       <div class="body">
8162         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
8163 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
8164 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
8165 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
8166 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
8167 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
8168 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
8169
8170 <pre>
8171 #!/usr/bin/python
8172 import sys
8173 import apt
8174 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8175     cache = apt.Cache()
8176     cache.open(None)
8177     thepkgs = []
8178     for pkg in cache:
8179         version = pkg.candidate
8180         if version is None:
8181             version = pkg.installed
8182         if version is None:
8183             continue
8184         record = version.record
8185         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
8186             continue
8187         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
8188         for t in mime_types:
8189             t = t.rstrip().strip()
8190             if t == mimetype:
8191                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
8192     return thepkgs
8193 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
8194 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
8195     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
8196 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
8197 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8198     print "  %s" %pkg
8199 </pre>
8200
8201 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
8202
8203 <pre>
8204 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
8205 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
8206   gecko-mediaplayer
8207 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
8208 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
8209   browser-plugin-gnash
8210 %
8211 </pre>
8212
8213 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
8214 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
8215 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
8216 anyone working on adding it?</p>
8217
8218 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
8219 request for icweasel support for this feature is
8220 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
8221 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
8222 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
8223 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
8224
8225       </div>
8226       <div class="tags">
8227
8228
8229         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>.
8230
8231
8232       </div>
8233     </div>
8234     <div class="padding"></div>
8235
8236     <div class="entry">
8237       <div class="title">
8238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
8239       </div>
8240       <div class="date">
8241         16th January 2013
8242       </div>
8243       <div class="body">
8244         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
8245 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
8246 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
8247 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
8248 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
8249 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
8250 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
8251 downloaded by the browser.</p>
8252
8253 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
8254 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
8255 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
8256 can be found on the
8257 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
8258 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
8259 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
8260 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
8261 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
8262
8263 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
8264
8265 <pre>
8266   count MIME type
8267   ----- -----------------------
8268      32 text/plain
8269      30 audio/mpeg
8270      29 image/png
8271      28 image/jpeg
8272      27 application/ogg
8273      26 audio/x-mp3
8274      25 image/tiff
8275      25 image/gif
8276      22 image/bmp
8277      22 audio/x-wav
8278      20 audio/x-flac
8279      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8280      18 video/x-ms-asf
8281      18 audio/x-musepack
8282      18 audio/x-mpeg
8283      18 application/x-ogg
8284      17 video/mpeg
8285      17 audio/x-scpls
8286      17 audio/ogg
8287      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8288 </pre>
8289
8290 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
8291
8292 <pre>
8293   count MIME type
8294   ----- -----------------------
8295      33 text/plain
8296      32 image/png
8297      32 image/jpeg
8298      29 audio/mpeg
8299      27 image/gif
8300      26 image/tiff
8301      26 application/ogg
8302      25 audio/x-mp3
8303      22 image/bmp
8304      21 audio/x-wav
8305      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8306      19 audio/x-mpeg
8307      18 video/mpeg
8308      18 audio/x-scpls
8309      18 audio/x-flac
8310      18 application/x-ogg
8311      17 video/x-ms-asf
8312      17 text/html
8313      17 audio/x-musepack
8314      16 image/x-xbitmap
8315 </pre>
8316
8317 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
8318
8319 <pre>
8320   count MIME type
8321   ----- -----------------------
8322      31 text/plain
8323      31 image/png
8324      31 image/jpeg
8325      29 audio/mpeg
8326      28 application/ogg
8327      27 image/gif
8328      26 image/tiff
8329      26 audio/x-mp3
8330      23 audio/x-wav
8331      22 image/bmp
8332      21 audio/x-flac
8333      20 audio/x-mpegurl
8334      19 audio/x-mpeg
8335      18 video/x-ms-asf
8336      18 video/mpeg
8337      18 audio/x-scpls
8338      18 application/x-ogg
8339      17 audio/x-musepack
8340      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8341      16 video/x-msvideo
8342 </pre>
8343
8344 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
8345 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
8346 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
8347 issues.</p>
8348
8349 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
8350 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
8351
8352       </div>
8353       <div class="tags">
8354
8355
8356         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>.
8357
8358
8359       </div>
8360     </div>
8361     <div class="padding"></div>
8362
8363     <div class="entry">
8364       <div class="title">
8365         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
8366       </div>
8367       <div class="date">
8368         15th January 2013
8369       </div>
8370       <div class="body">
8371         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
8372 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
8373 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
8374 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
8375 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
8376 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
8377 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
8378 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
8379 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
8380 packages.</p>
8381
8382 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
8383 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
8384 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
8385 modalias.</p>
8386
8387 <p><blockquote>
8388 Package: package-name
8389 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
8390 </blockquote></p>
8391
8392 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
8393 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
8394
8395 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
8396 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
8397
8398 <p><blockquote>
8399 Package: cheese
8400 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
8401 </blockquote></p>
8402
8403 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
8404 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
8405
8406 <p><blockquote>
8407 Package: pcmciautils
8408 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
8409 </blockquote></p>
8410
8411 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
8412 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
8413
8414 <p><blockquote>
8415 Package: colorhug-client
8416 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
8417 </blockquote></p>
8418
8419 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
8420 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
8421 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
8422
8423 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
8424 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
8425 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
8426 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
8427 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
8428 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
8429 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
8430 Raring.</p>
8431
8432 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
8433 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
8434 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
8435 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
8436 try the
8437 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
8438 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
8439 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
8440 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
8441
8442 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
8443 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
8444
8445 <p><blockquote>
8446 % ./hw-support-lookup
8447 <br>yubikey-personalization
8448 <br>%
8449 </blockquote></p>
8450
8451 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
8452 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
8453
8454 <p><blockquote>
8455 % ./hw-support-lookup
8456 <br>pcmciautils
8457 <br>%
8458 </blockquote></p>
8459
8460 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
8461 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
8462 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
8463
8464 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
8465 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
8466 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
8467 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
8468 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
8469 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
8470 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
8471 see if it work.</p>
8472
8473 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8474 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8475 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8476 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8477
8478       </div>
8479       <div class="tags">
8480
8481
8482         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>.
8483
8484
8485       </div>
8486     </div>
8487     <div class="padding"></div>
8488
8489     <div class="entry">
8490       <div class="title">
8491         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
8492       </div>
8493       <div class="date">
8494         14th January 2013
8495       </div>
8496       <div class="body">
8497         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
8498 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
8499 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
8500 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
8501 in
8502 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8503 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
8504
8505 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
8506
8507 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
8508 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
8509 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
8510 &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;,
8511 &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
8512 &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;.
8513
8514 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
8515 this shell script:</p>
8516
8517 <pre>
8518 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
8519 </pre>
8520
8521 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
8522 using modinfo:</p>
8523
8524 <pre>
8525 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
8526 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
8527 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
8528 %
8529 </pre>
8530
8531 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
8532
8533 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
8534 Bridge memory controller:</p>
8535
8536 <p><blockquote>
8537 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
8538 </blockquote></p>
8539
8540 <p>This represent these values:</p>
8541
8542 <pre>
8543  v   00008086  (vendor)
8544  d   00002770  (device)
8545  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
8546  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
8547  bc  06        (bus class)
8548  sc  00        (bus subclass)
8549  i   00        (interface)
8550 </pre>
8551
8552 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
8553 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
8554 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
8555 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
8556
8557 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
8558 means.</p>
8559
8560 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
8561
8562 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
8563 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
8564
8565 <p><blockquote>
8566 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
8567 </blockquote></p>
8568
8569 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
8570
8571 <pre>
8572  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
8573  p    0001  (device product)
8574  d    0206  (bcddevice)
8575  dc     09  (device class)
8576  dsc    00  (device subclass)
8577  dp     00  (device protocol)
8578  ic     09  (interface class)
8579  isc    00  (interface subclass)
8580  ip     00  (interface protocol)
8581 </pre>
8582
8583 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
8584 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
8585 these alias entries show up:</p>
8586
8587 <p><blockquote>
8588 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
8589 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
8590 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
8591 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
8592 </blockquote></p>
8593
8594 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
8595 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
8596 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
8597
8598 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
8599
8600 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
8601 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
8602
8603 <p><blockquote>
8604 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8605 </blockquote></p>
8606
8607 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
8608
8609 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
8610
8611 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
8612 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
8613 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
8614
8615 <p><blockquote>
8616 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
8617 </blockquote></p>
8618
8619 <p>The values present are</p>
8620
8621 <pre>
8622  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
8623  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
8624  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
8625  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
8626  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
8627  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
8628  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
8629  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
8630  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
8631  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
8632  ct   10             (chassis type)
8633  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
8634 </pre>
8635
8636 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
8637 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
8638
8639 <pre>
8640   3 Desktop
8641   4 Low Profile Desktop
8642   5 Pizza Box
8643   6 Mini Tower
8644   7 Tower
8645   8 Portable
8646   9 Laptop
8647  10 Notebook
8648  11 Hand Held
8649  12 Docking Station
8650  13 All In One
8651  14 Sub Notebook
8652  15 Space-saving
8653  16 Lunch Box
8654  17 Main Server Chassis
8655  18 Expansion Chassis
8656  19 Sub Chassis
8657  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
8658  21 Peripheral Chassis
8659  22 RAID Chassis
8660  23 Rack Mount Chassis
8661  24 Sealed-case PC
8662  25 Multi-system
8663  26 CompactPCI
8664  27 AdvancedTCA
8665  28 Blade
8666  29 Blade Enclosing
8667 </pre>
8668
8669 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
8670 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
8671 claim it is a desktop.</p>
8672
8673 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
8674
8675 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
8676 test machine:</p>
8677
8678 <p><blockquote>
8679 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
8680 </blockquote></p>
8681
8682 <p>The values present are</p>
8683
8684 <pre>
8685   ty  01  (type)
8686   pr  00  (prototype)
8687   id  00  (id)
8688   ex  00  (extra)
8689 </pre>
8690
8691 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
8692 the valid values are.</p>
8693
8694 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
8695
8696 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
8697 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
8698 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
8699 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
8700 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
8701 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
8702 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
8703
8704 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
8705
8706 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
8707 one can use the following shell script:</p>
8708
8709 <pre>
8710   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
8711     echo "$id" ; \
8712     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
8713   done
8714 </pre>
8715
8716 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
8717 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
8718
8719 <pre>
8720   acpi:ACPI0003:
8721     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
8722   acpi:device:
8723   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
8724   acpi:IBM0068:
8725     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
8726     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
8727     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
8728     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
8729   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8730     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
8731     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
8732     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
8733   [...]
8734 </pre>
8735
8736 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8737 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8738 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8739 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8740
8741 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
8742 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
8743 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
8744
8745       </div>
8746       <div class="tags">
8747
8748
8749         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>.
8750
8751
8752       </div>
8753     </div>
8754     <div class="padding"></div>
8755
8756     <div class="entry">
8757       <div class="title">
8758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
8759       </div>
8760       <div class="date">
8761         10th January 2013
8762       </div>
8763       <div class="body">
8764         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
8765 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
8766 Launcher and updated the Debian package
8767 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
8768 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
8769 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
8770 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
8771 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
8772 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
8773 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
8774 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
8775 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
8776 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
8777 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
8778 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
8779 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
8780 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
8781 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
8782
8783       </div>
8784       <div class="tags">
8785
8786
8787         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8788
8789
8790       </div>
8791     </div>
8792     <div class="padding"></div>
8793
8794     <div class="entry">
8795       <div class="title">
8796         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
8797       </div>
8798       <div class="date">
8799          9th January 2013
8800       </div>
8801       <div class="body">
8802         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
8803 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
8804 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
8805 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
8806 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
8807 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
8808 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
8809 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
8810 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
8811 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
8812 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
8813
8814 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
8815 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
8816 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
8817 simple:
8818
8819 <ul>
8820
8821 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
8822   starting when a user log in.</li>
8823
8824 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
8825   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
8826
8827 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
8828   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
8829   packages.</li>
8830
8831 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
8832   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
8833
8834 </ul>
8835
8836 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
8837 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
8838 discover database to find packages and
8839 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
8840 packages.</p>
8841
8842 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
8843 draft package is now checked into
8844 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8845 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
8846 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
8847 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
8848 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
8849 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
8850 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
8851 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
8852 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
8853 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
8854 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
8855 because of the freeze).</p>
8856
8857 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
8858 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
8859 inserted):</p>
8860
8861 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
8862
8863 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
8864 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
8865 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
8866
8867 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
8868 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
8869 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
8870 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
8871 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
8872 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
8873 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
8874
8875 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
8876 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
8877 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
8878 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
8879 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
8880 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
8881 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
8882 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
8883 not be installed?</p>
8884
8885 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
8886 please send me an email. :)</p>
8887
8888       </div>
8889       <div class="tags">
8890
8891
8892         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>.
8893
8894
8895       </div>
8896     </div>
8897     <div class="padding"></div>
8898
8899     <div class="entry">
8900       <div class="title">
8901         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
8902       </div>
8903       <div class="date">
8904          2nd January 2013
8905       </div>
8906       <div class="body">
8907         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
8908 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
8909 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
8910 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
8911 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
8912 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
8913 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
8914 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
8915 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
8916 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
8917
8918 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
8919 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
8920 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
8921
8922       </div>
8923       <div class="tags">
8924
8925
8926         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/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8927
8928
8929       </div>
8930     </div>
8931     <div class="padding"></div>
8932
8933     <div class="entry">
8934       <div class="title">
8935         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
8936       </div>
8937       <div class="date">
8938         25th December 2012
8939       </div>
8940       <div class="body">
8941         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
8942 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
8943
8944 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
8945 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
8946 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
8947 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
8948 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
8949 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
8950 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
8951 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
8952 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
8953 name.</p>
8954
8955 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
8956 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
8957 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
8958
8959 <blockquote><pre>
8960 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
8961 cd bitcoin
8962 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
8963 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
8964 </pre></blockquote>
8965
8966 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
8967 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
8968 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
8969 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
8970 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
8971 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
8972 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
8973 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
8974 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
8975
8976 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8977 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8978 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8979
8980       </div>
8981       <div class="tags">
8982
8983
8984         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8985
8986
8987       </div>
8988     </div>
8989     <div class="padding"></div>
8990
8991     <div class="entry">
8992       <div class="title">
8993         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
8994       </div>
8995       <div class="date">
8996         21st December 2012
8997       </div>
8998       <div class="body">
8999         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
9000 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
9001 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
9002 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
9003 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
9004 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
9005 is now maintained by a
9006 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
9007 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
9008 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
9009 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
9010 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
9011 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
9012 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
9013 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
9014 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
9015 Corallo in a
9016 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
9017 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
9018 Debian package.</p>
9019
9020 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
9021 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
9022 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
9023 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
9024 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
9025 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
9026 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
9027 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
9028 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
9029 new version to unstable.
9030
9031 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
9032 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
9033 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
9034 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
9035 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
9036 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
9037 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
9038 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
9039 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
9040 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
9041 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
9042 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
9043 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
9044 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
9045 have not tested them.</p>
9046
9047 <p>My
9048 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
9049 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
9050 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
9051 years ago, as can be
9052 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
9053 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
9054 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
9055 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
9056 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
9057 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
9058 the same address as last time,
9059 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9060
9061       </div>
9062       <div class="tags">
9063
9064
9065         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9066
9067
9068       </div>
9069     </div>
9070     <div class="padding"></div>
9071
9072     <div class="entry">
9073       <div class="title">
9074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
9075       </div>
9076       <div class="date">
9077          7th September 2012
9078       </div>
9079       <div class="body">
9080         <p>As I
9081 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
9082 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
9083 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
9084 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
9085 repository for the project</a>.</p>
9086
9087 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
9088 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
9089 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
9090 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
9091
9092 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
9093 PostScript formats at
9094 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
9095 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
9096
9097       </div>
9098       <div class="tags">
9099
9100
9101         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
9102
9103
9104       </div>
9105     </div>
9106     <div class="padding"></div>
9107
9108     <div class="entry">
9109       <div class="title">
9110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
9111       </div>
9112       <div class="date">
9113         16th August 2012
9114       </div>
9115       <div class="body">
9116         <p>I dag fyller
9117 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
9118 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
9119 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
9120
9121       </div>
9122       <div class="tags">
9123
9124
9125         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
9126
9127
9128       </div>
9129     </div>
9130     <div class="padding"></div>
9131
9132     <div class="entry">
9133       <div class="title">
9134         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
9135       </div>
9136       <div class="date">
9137         24th June 2012
9138       </div>
9139       <div class="body">
9140         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
9141 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
9142 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
9143 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
9144 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
9145 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
9146 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
9147 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
9148 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
9149 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
9150 missing in my book.</p>
9151
9152 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
9153 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
9154 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
9155 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
9156 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
9157 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
9158 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
9159
9160       </div>
9161       <div class="tags">
9162
9163
9164         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
9165
9166
9167       </div>
9168     </div>
9169     <div class="padding"></div>
9170
9171     <div class="entry">
9172       <div class="title">
9173         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
9174       </div>
9175       <div class="date">
9176         21st November 2011
9177       </div>
9178       <div class="body">
9179         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
9180 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
9181 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
9182 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
9183 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
9184 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
9185 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
9186 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
9187 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
9188 the tools to do so.</p>
9189
9190 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
9191 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
9192 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
9193 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
9194
9195 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
9196 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
9197 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
9198 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
9199 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
9200 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
9201 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
9202 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
9203
9204 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
9205 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
9206 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
9207
9208 <p><pre>
9209 #!/usr/bin/perl
9210 use strict;
9211 use warnings;
9212 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
9213 BEGIN {
9214     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
9215     my %rhelmodules = (
9216         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
9217         );
9218     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
9219         eval "use $module;";
9220         if ($@) {
9221             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
9222             system("yum install -y $pkg");
9223             eval "use $module;";
9224         }
9225     }
9226 }
9227 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
9228
9229 upgrade_dell();
9230
9231 exit 0;
9232
9233 sub run_firmware_script {
9234     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
9235     unless ($script) {
9236         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
9237         exit 1
9238     }
9239     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
9240
9241     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
9242         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
9243     } else {
9244         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
9245     }
9246 }
9247
9248 sub run_firmware_scripts {
9249     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
9250     # Run firmware packages
9251     for my $dir (@dirs) {
9252         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
9253         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
9254         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
9255             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
9256             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
9257         }
9258         closedir $dh;
9259     }
9260 }
9261
9262 sub download {
9263     my $url = shift;
9264     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
9265     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
9266 }
9267
9268 sub upgrade_dell {
9269     my @dirs;
9270     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
9271     chomp $product;
9272
9273     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
9274
9275         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
9276         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
9277
9278         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
9279             CLEANUP => 1
9280             );
9281         chdir($tmpdir);
9282         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
9283         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
9284         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
9285         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
9286         my $fwopts = "-q";
9287         if (@paths) {
9288             for my $url (@paths) {
9289                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
9290             }
9291             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
9292         } else {
9293             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
9294             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
9295         }
9296         chdir('/');
9297     } else {
9298         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
9299         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
9300     }
9301 }
9302
9303 sub fetch_dell_fw {
9304     my $path = shift;
9305     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
9306     download($url);
9307 }
9308
9309 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
9310 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
9311 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
9312 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
9313     my $filename = shift;
9314
9315     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
9316     chomp $product;
9317     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
9318
9319     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
9320
9321     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
9322     my @paths;
9323     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
9324         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
9325         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
9326         my $oscode;
9327         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
9328             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
9329         } else {
9330             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
9331         }
9332         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
9333         {
9334             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
9335         }
9336     }
9337     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
9338         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
9339
9340         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
9341         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
9342
9343         my $cpath = $component->{path};
9344         for my $path (@paths) {
9345             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
9346                 push(@paths, $cpath);
9347             }
9348         }
9349     }
9350     return @paths;
9351 }
9352 </pre>
9353
9354 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
9355 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
9356 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
9357 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
9358 outdated.</p>
9359
9360       </div>
9361       <div class="tags">
9362
9363
9364         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>.
9365
9366
9367       </div>
9368     </div>
9369     <div class="padding"></div>
9370
9371     <div class="entry">
9372       <div class="title">
9373         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
9374       </div>
9375       <div class="date">
9376          4th August 2011
9377       </div>
9378       <div class="body">
9379         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
9380 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
9381 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
9382 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
9383 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
9384 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
9385 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
9386 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
9387 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
9388
9389 <p><blockquote>
9390 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
9391 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
9392 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
9393 </blockquote></p>
9394
9395 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
9396 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
9397 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
9398 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
9399 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
9400 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
9401 hard to explain.</p>
9402
9403 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
9404 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
9405 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
9406 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
9407 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
9408 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
9409 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
9410 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
9411 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
9412 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
9413 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
9414 mode).</p>
9415
9416 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
9417 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
9418 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
9419 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
9420 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
9421 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
9422 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
9423 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
9424 after visiting single user mode.</p>
9425
9426 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
9427 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
9428 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
9429 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
9430 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
9431 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
9432 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
9433 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
9434
9435 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
9436 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
9437 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
9438
9439       </div>
9440       <div class="tags">
9441
9442
9443         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9444
9445
9446       </div>
9447     </div>
9448     <div class="padding"></div>
9449
9450     <div class="entry">
9451       <div class="title">
9452         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
9453       </div>
9454       <div class="date">
9455         30th July 2011
9456       </div>
9457       <div class="body">
9458         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
9459 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
9460 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
9461 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
9462 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
9463 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
9464 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
9465 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
9466 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
9467 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
9468 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
9469 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
9470 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
9471
9472 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
9473 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
9474 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
9475 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
9476 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
9477 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
9478 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
9479 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
9480 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
9481
9482 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
9483 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
9484 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
9485 is presented.</p>
9486
9487 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
9488 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
9489 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
9490 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
9491 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
9492 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
9493 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
9494 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
9495 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
9496 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
9497 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
9498 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
9499 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
9500 find time to push this forward.</p>
9501
9502       </div>
9503       <div class="tags">
9504
9505
9506         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9507
9508
9509       </div>
9510     </div>
9511     <div class="padding"></div>
9512
9513     <div class="entry">
9514       <div class="title">
9515         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
9516       </div>
9517       <div class="date">
9518         29th July 2011
9519       </div>
9520       <div class="body">
9521         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
9522 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
9523 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
9524 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
9525 issues.</p>
9526
9527 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
9528 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
9529 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
9530
9531 <ol>
9532
9533 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
9534 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
9535 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
9536 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
9537 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
9538 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
9539 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
9540 Debian.</li>
9541
9542 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
9543 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
9544 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
9545 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
9546 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
9547 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
9548 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
9549 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
9550 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
9551 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
9552 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
9553 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
9554 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
9555
9556 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
9557 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
9558 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
9559 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
9560 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
9561 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
9562 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
9563 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
9564 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
9565 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
9566
9567 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
9568 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
9569 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
9570 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
9571 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
9572 latter behaviour.</li>
9573
9574 </ol>
9575
9576 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
9577 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
9578 it do not matter much.</p>
9579
9580 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
9581 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
9582 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
9583
9584       </div>
9585       <div class="tags">
9586
9587
9588         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/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9589
9590
9591       </div>
9592     </div>
9593     <div class="padding"></div>
9594
9595     <div class="entry">
9596       <div class="title">
9597         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
9598       </div>
9599       <div class="date">
9600         26th July 2011
9601       </div>
9602       <div class="body">
9603         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
9604 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
9605 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
9606 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
9607 security support for a few years.</p>
9608
9609 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
9610 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
9611 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
9612 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
9613 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
9614 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
9615 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
9616 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
9617 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
9618 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
9619 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
9620 easier in the future.</p>
9621
9622 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
9623 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
9624 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
9625 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
9626 do not have time for.</p>
9627
9628       </div>
9629       <div class="tags">
9630
9631
9632         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
9633
9634
9635       </div>
9636     </div>
9637     <div class="padding"></div>
9638
9639     <div class="entry">
9640       <div class="title">
9641         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
9642       </div>
9643       <div class="date">
9644          3rd April 2011
9645       </div>
9646       <div class="body">
9647         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
9648 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
9649 update in English.</p>
9650
9651 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
9652 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
9653 of the British service
9654 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
9655 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
9656 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
9657 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
9658 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
9659 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
9660 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
9661 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
9662 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
9663 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
9664 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
9665 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
9666 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
9667
9668 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
9669 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
9670 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
9671 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
9672 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
9673 public infrastructure.</p>
9674
9675 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
9676 such service?</p>
9677
9678       </div>
9679       <div class="tags">
9680
9681
9682         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
9683
9684
9685       </div>
9686     </div>
9687     <div class="padding"></div>
9688
9689     <div class="entry">
9690       <div class="title">
9691         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
9692       </div>
9693       <div class="date">
9694         28th January 2011
9695       </div>
9696       <div class="body">
9697         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
9698 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
9699 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
9700 available on the Internet, and check our locally
9701 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
9702 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
9703 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
9704 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
9705 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
9706 out which security holes were present in our free software
9707 collection.</p>
9708
9709 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
9710 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
9711 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
9712 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
9713 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
9714 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
9715 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
9716 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
9717 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
9718 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
9719 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
9720 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
9721 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
9722 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
9723 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
9724 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
9725
9726 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
9727 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
9728 check out, one could look up
9729 <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
9730 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
9731 The most recent one is
9732 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
9733 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
9734 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
9735
9736 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
9737 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
9738 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
9739 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
9740 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
9741 security issues out.</p>
9742
9743 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
9744 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
9745 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
9746 RHEL is providing
9747 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
9748 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
9749 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
9750
9751 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
9752 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
9753 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
9754 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
9755 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
9756 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
9757 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
9758 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
9759 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
9760 established soon.</p>
9761
9762 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
9763 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
9764 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
9765 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
9766 for their packages.</p>
9767
9768       </div>
9769       <div class="tags">
9770
9771
9772         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9773
9774
9775       </div>
9776     </div>
9777     <div class="padding"></div>
9778
9779     <div class="entry">
9780       <div class="title">
9781         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
9782       </div>
9783       <div class="date">
9784         23rd January 2011
9785       </div>
9786       <div class="body">
9787         <p>In the
9788 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
9789 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
9790 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
9791 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
9792 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
9793 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
9794 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
9795 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
9796 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
9797 one of my machines like this:</p>
9798
9799 <pre>
9800 loaded modules:
9801 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
9802 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
9803 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
9804 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
9805 10de:03ec pata_amd
9806 10de:03f6 sata_nv
9807 1022:1103 k8temp
9808 109e:036e bttv
9809 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
9810 11ab:4364 sky2
9811 </pre>
9812
9813 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
9814 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
9815
9816 <pre>
9817 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
9818     echo loaded pci modules:
9819     (
9820         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
9821         for address in * ; do
9822             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9823                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9824                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9825                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9826                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
9827                     echo "$id $module"
9828                 fi
9829             fi
9830         done
9831     )
9832     echo
9833 fi
9834 </pre>
9835
9836 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
9837 mappings:</p>
9838
9839 <pre>
9840 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
9841     echo loaded usb modules:
9842     (
9843         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
9844         for address in * ; do
9845             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9846                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9847                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9848                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9849                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
9850                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
9851                         echo "$id $module"
9852                     fi
9853                 fi
9854             fi
9855         done
9856     )
9857     echo
9858 fi
9859 </pre>
9860
9861 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
9862 well.</p>
9863
9864       </div>
9865       <div class="tags">
9866
9867
9868         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>.
9869
9870
9871       </div>
9872     </div>
9873     <div class="padding"></div>
9874
9875     <div class="entry">
9876       <div class="title">
9877         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
9878       </div>
9879       <div class="date">
9880         22nd December 2010
9881       </div>
9882       <div class="body">
9883         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
9884 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
9885 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
9886 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
9887 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
9888 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
9889 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
9890 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
9891 university.</p>
9892
9893 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
9894 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
9895 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
9896 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
9897 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
9898 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
9899 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
9900 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
9901
9902 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
9903 I perform on a new model.</p>
9904
9905 <ul>
9906
9907 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
9908 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
9909 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
9910
9911 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
9912 installation, X.org is working.</li>
9913
9914 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
9915 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
9916 reported by the program.</li>
9917
9918 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
9919 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
9920 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
9921 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
9922 normally test this by playing
9923 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
9924 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
9925
9926 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
9927 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9928
9929 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
9930 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9931
9932 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
9933 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
9934
9935 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
9936 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
9937 few.</li>
9938
9939 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
9940 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
9941 notice this.</li>
9942
9943 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
9944 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
9945 resume.</li>
9946
9947 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
9948 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
9949 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
9950 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
9951 not.</li>
9952
9953 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
9954 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
9955 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
9956 existence.</li>
9957
9958 </ul>
9959
9960 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
9961 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
9962 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
9963 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
9964 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
9965 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
9966 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
9967 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
9968
9969       </div>
9970       <div class="tags">
9971
9972
9973         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9974
9975
9976       </div>
9977     </div>
9978     <div class="padding"></div>
9979
9980     <div class="entry">
9981       <div class="title">
9982         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
9983       </div>
9984       <div class="date">
9985         11th December 2010
9986       </div>
9987       <div class="body">
9988         <p>As I continue to explore
9989 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
9990 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
9991 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
9992
9993 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
9994 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
9995 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
9996 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
9997 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
9998 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
9999 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
10000 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
10001 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
10002 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
10003 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
10004 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
10005 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
10006 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
10007 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
10008 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
10009 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
10010 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
10011 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
10012 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
10013
10014 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
10015 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
10016 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
10017 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
10018 If the Skolelinux foundation
10019 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
10020 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
10021 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
10022 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
10023 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
10024 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
10025 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
10026 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
10027
10028 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
10029 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
10030 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
10031 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
10032 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
10033 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
10034 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
10035 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
10036 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
10037 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
10038 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
10039 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
10040 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
10041 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
10042 currencies.</p>
10043
10044 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
10045 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
10046 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
10047 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
10048 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
10049 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
10050 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
10051 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
10052 BitCoins.  Check out
10053 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
10054 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
10055 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
10056 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
10057 yet.</p>
10058
10059 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
10060 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
10061 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
10062 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
10063 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
10064
10065       </div>
10066       <div class="tags">
10067
10068
10069         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
10070
10071
10072       </div>
10073     </div>
10074     <div class="padding"></div>
10075
10076     <div class="entry">
10077       <div class="title">
10078         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
10079       </div>
10080       <div class="date">
10081         10th December 2010
10082       </div>
10083       <div class="body">
10084         <p>With this weeks lawless
10085 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
10086 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
10087 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
10088 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
10089 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
10090 A blog post from
10091 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
10092 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
10093 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
10094 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
10095 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
10096 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
10097 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
10098
10099 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
10100 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
10101 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
10102 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
10103 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
10104 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
10105 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
10106 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
10107 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
10108 Debian</a> soon.</p>
10109
10110 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
10111 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
10112 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
10113 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
10114 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
10115 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
10116 you can even get
10117 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
10118 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
10119 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
10120 on the current exchange rates.</p>
10121
10122 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
10123 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
10124 donations to the address
10125 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
10126
10127       </div>
10128       <div class="tags">
10129
10130
10131         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
10132
10133
10134       </div>
10135     </div>
10136     <div class="padding"></div>
10137
10138     <div class="entry">
10139       <div class="title">
10140         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
10141       </div>
10142       <div class="date">
10143         27th November 2010
10144       </div>
10145       <div class="body">
10146         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
10147 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
10148 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
10149 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
10150 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
10151 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
10152 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
10153 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
10154
10155 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
10156 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
10157 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
10158 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
10159 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
10160 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
10161 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
10162 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
10163 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
10164 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
10165 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
10166
10167 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
10168 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
10169 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
10170 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
10171 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
10172 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
10173 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
10174 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
10175 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
10176 what is going on.</p>
10177
10178       </div>
10179       <div class="tags">
10180
10181
10182         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10183
10184
10185       </div>
10186     </div>
10187     <div class="padding"></div>
10188
10189     <div class="entry">
10190       <div class="title">
10191         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
10192       </div>
10193       <div class="date">
10194         22nd November 2010
10195       </div>
10196       <div class="body">
10197         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
10198 upgrade testing of the
10199 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
10200 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
10201 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
10202 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
10203
10204 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
10205
10206 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10207
10208 <blockquote><p>
10209   apache2.2-bin
10210   aptdaemon
10211   baobab
10212   binfmt-support
10213   browser-plugin-gnash
10214   cheese-common
10215   cli-common
10216   cups-pk-helper
10217   dmz-cursor-theme
10218   empathy
10219   empathy-common
10220   freedesktop-sound-theme
10221   freeglut3
10222   gconf-defaults-service
10223   gdm-themes
10224   gedit-plugins
10225   geoclue
10226   geoclue-hostip
10227   geoclue-localnet
10228   geoclue-manual
10229   geoclue-yahoo
10230   gnash
10231   gnash-common
10232   gnome
10233   gnome-backgrounds
10234   gnome-cards-data
10235   gnome-codec-install
10236   gnome-core
10237   gnome-desktop-environment
10238   gnome-disk-utility
10239   gnome-screenshot
10240   gnome-search-tool
10241   gnome-session-canberra
10242   gnome-system-log
10243   gnome-themes-extras
10244   gnome-themes-more
10245   gnome-user-share
10246   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10247   gstreamer0.10-tools
10248   gtk2-engines
10249   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10250   gtk2-engines-smooth
10251   hamster-applet
10252   libapache2-mod-dnssd
10253   libapr1
10254   libaprutil1
10255   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
10256   libaprutil1-ldap
10257   libart2.0-cil
10258   libboost-date-time1.42.0
10259   libboost-python1.42.0
10260   libboost-thread1.42.0
10261   libchamplain-0.4-0
10262   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
10263   libcheese-gtk18
10264   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10265   libcryptui0
10266   libdiscid0
10267   libelf1
10268   libepc-1.0-2
10269   libepc-common
10270   libepc-ui-1.0-2
10271   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10272   libfreerdp0
10273   libgconf2.0-cil
10274   libgdata-common
10275   libgdata7
10276   libgdu-gtk0
10277   libgee2
10278   libgeoclue0
10279   libgexiv2-0
10280   libgif4
10281   libglade2.0-cil
10282   libglib2.0-cil
10283   libgmime2.4-cil
10284   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10285   libgnome2.24-cil
10286   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
10287   libgpod-common
10288   libgpod4
10289   libgtk2.0-cil
10290   libgtkglext1
10291   libgtksourceview2.0-common
10292   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10293   libmono-addins0.2-cil
10294   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
10295   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10296   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
10297   libmono-posix2.0-cil
10298   libmono-security2.0-cil
10299   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10300   libmono-system2.0-cil
10301   libmtp8
10302   libmusicbrainz3-6
10303   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
10304   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
10305   libopal3.6.8
10306   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
10307   libpt2.6.7
10308   libpython2.6
10309   librpm1
10310   librpmio1
10311   libsdl1.2debian
10312   libsrtp0
10313   libssh-4
10314   libtelepathy-farsight0
10315   libtelepathy-glib0
10316   libtidy-0.99-0
10317   media-player-info
10318   mesa-utils
10319   mono-2.0-gac
10320   mono-gac
10321   mono-runtime
10322   nautilus-sendto
10323   nautilus-sendto-empathy
10324   p7zip-full
10325   pkg-config
10326   python-aptdaemon
10327   python-aptdaemon-gtk
10328   python-axiom
10329   python-beautifulsoup
10330   python-bugbuddy
10331   python-clientform
10332   python-coherence
10333   python-configobj
10334   python-crypto
10335   python-cupshelpers
10336   python-elementtree
10337   python-epsilon
10338   python-evolution
10339   python-feedparser
10340   python-gdata
10341   python-gdbm
10342   python-gst0.10
10343   python-gtkglext1
10344   python-gtksourceview2
10345   python-httplib2
10346   python-louie
10347   python-mako
10348   python-markupsafe
10349   python-mechanize
10350   python-nevow
10351   python-notify
10352   python-opengl
10353   python-openssl
10354   python-pam
10355   python-pkg-resources
10356   python-pyasn1
10357   python-pysqlite2
10358   python-rdflib
10359   python-serial
10360   python-tagpy
10361   python-twisted-bin
10362   python-twisted-conch
10363   python-twisted-core
10364   python-twisted-web
10365   python-utidylib
10366   python-webkit
10367   python-xdg
10368   python-zope.interface
10369   remmina
10370   remmina-plugin-data
10371   remmina-plugin-rdp
10372   remmina-plugin-vnc
10373   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10374   rhythmbox-plugins
10375   rpm-common
10376   rpm2cpio
10377   seahorse-plugins
10378   shotwell
10379   software-center
10380   system-config-printer-udev
10381   telepathy-gabble
10382   telepathy-mission-control-5
10383   telepathy-salut
10384   tomboy
10385   totem
10386   totem-coherence
10387   totem-mozilla
10388   totem-plugins
10389   transmission-common
10390   xdg-user-dirs
10391   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
10392   xserver-xephyr
10393 </p></blockquote>
10394
10395 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10396
10397 <blockquote><p>
10398   cheese
10399   ekiga
10400   eog
10401   epiphany-extensions
10402   evolution-exchange
10403   fast-user-switch-applet
10404   file-roller
10405   gcalctool
10406   gconf-editor
10407   gdm
10408   gedit
10409   gedit-common
10410   gnome-games
10411   gnome-games-data
10412   gnome-nettool
10413   gnome-system-tools
10414   gnome-themes
10415   gnuchess
10416   gucharmap
10417   guile-1.8-libs
10418   libavahi-ui0
10419   libdmx1
10420   libgalago3
10421   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10422   libgtksourceview2.0-0
10423   liblircclient0
10424   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
10425   libspeexdsp1
10426   libsvga1
10427   rhythmbox
10428   seahorse
10429   sound-juicer
10430   system-config-printer
10431   totem-common
10432   transmission-gtk
10433   vinagre
10434   vino
10435 </p></blockquote>
10436
10437 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10438
10439 <blockquote><p>
10440   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10441 </p></blockquote>
10442
10443 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10444
10445 <blockquote><p>
10446 [nothing]
10447 </p></blockquote>
10448
10449 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10450
10451 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10452
10453 <blockquote><p>
10454   ksmserver
10455 </p></blockquote>
10456
10457 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10458
10459 <blockquote><p>
10460   kwin
10461   network-manager-kde
10462 </p></blockquote>
10463
10464 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10465
10466 <blockquote><p>
10467   arts
10468   dolphin
10469   freespacenotifier
10470   google-gadgets-gst
10471   google-gadgets-xul
10472   kappfinder
10473   kcalc
10474   kcharselect
10475   kde-core
10476   kde-plasma-desktop
10477   kde-standard
10478   kde-window-manager
10479   kdeartwork
10480   kdeartwork-emoticons
10481   kdeartwork-style
10482   kdeartwork-theme-icon
10483   kdebase
10484   kdebase-apps
10485   kdebase-workspace
10486   kdebase-workspace-bin
10487   kdebase-workspace-data
10488   kdeeject
10489   kdelibs
10490   kdeplasma-addons
10491   kdeutils
10492   kdewallpapers
10493   kdf
10494   kfloppy
10495   kgpg
10496   khelpcenter4
10497   kinfocenter
10498   konq-plugins-l10n
10499   konqueror-nsplugins
10500   kscreensaver
10501   kscreensaver-xsavers
10502   ktimer
10503   kwrite
10504   libgle3
10505   libkde4-ruby1.8
10506   libkonq5
10507   libkonq5-templates
10508   libnetpbm10
10509   libplasma-ruby
10510   libplasma-ruby1.8
10511   libqt4-ruby1.8
10512   marble-data
10513   marble-plugins
10514   netpbm
10515   nuvola-icon-theme
10516   plasma-dataengines-workspace
10517   plasma-desktop
10518   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
10519   plasma-runners-addons
10520   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
10521   plasma-scriptengine-python
10522   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
10523   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
10524   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
10525   plasma-scriptengines
10526   plasma-wallpapers-addons
10527   plasma-widget-folderview
10528   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10529   ruby
10530   sweeper
10531   update-notifier-kde
10532   xscreensaver-data-extra
10533   xscreensaver-gl
10534   xscreensaver-gl-extra
10535   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10536 </p></blockquote>
10537
10538 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10539
10540 <blockquote><p>
10541   ark
10542   google-gadgets-common
10543   google-gadgets-qt
10544   htdig
10545   kate
10546   kdebase-bin
10547   kdebase-data
10548   kdepasswd
10549   kfind
10550   klipper
10551   konq-plugins
10552   konqueror
10553   ksysguard
10554   ksysguardd
10555   libarchive1
10556   libcln6
10557   libeet1
10558   libeina-svn-06
10559   libggadget-1.0-0b
10560   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
10561   libgps19
10562   libkdecorations4
10563   libkephal4
10564   libkonq4
10565   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
10566   libkscreensaver5
10567   libksgrd4
10568   libksignalplotter4
10569   libkunitconversion4
10570   libkwineffects1a
10571   libmarblewidget4
10572   libntrack-qt4-1
10573   libntrack0
10574   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
10575   libplasmaclock4a
10576   libplasmagenericshell4
10577   libprocesscore4a
10578   libprocessui4a
10579   libqalculate5
10580   libqedje0a
10581   libqtruby4shared2
10582   libqzion0a
10583   libruby1.8
10584   libscim8c2a
10585   libsmokekdecore4-3
10586   libsmokekdeui4-3
10587   libsmokekfile3
10588   libsmokekhtml3
10589   libsmokekio3
10590   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
10591   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
10592   libsmokekparts3
10593   libsmokektexteditor3
10594   libsmokekutils3
10595   libsmokenepomuk3
10596   libsmokephonon3
10597   libsmokeplasma3
10598   libsmokeqtcore4-3
10599   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
10600   libsmokeqtgui4-3
10601   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
10602   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
10603   libsmokeqtscript4-3
10604   libsmokeqtsql4-3
10605   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
10606   libsmokeqttest4-3
10607   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
10608   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
10609   libsmokeqtxml4-3
10610   libsmokesolid3
10611   libsmokesoprano3
10612   libtaskmanager4a
10613   libtidy-0.99-0
10614   libweather-ion4a
10615   libxklavier16
10616   libxxf86misc1
10617   okteta
10618   oxygencursors
10619   plasma-dataengines-addons
10620   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
10621   plasma-widget-lancelot
10622   plasma-widgets-addons
10623   plasma-widgets-workspace
10624   polkit-kde-1
10625   ruby1.8
10626   systemsettings
10627   update-notifier-common
10628 </p></blockquote>
10629
10630 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
10631 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
10632 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
10633 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
10634
10635       </div>
10636       <div class="tags">
10637
10638
10639         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10640
10641
10642       </div>
10643     </div>
10644     <div class="padding"></div>
10645
10646     <div class="entry">
10647       <div class="title">
10648         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
10649       </div>
10650       <div class="date">
10651         22nd November 2010
10652       </div>
10653       <div class="body">
10654         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
10655 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
10656 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
10657 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
10658 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
10659 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
10660 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
10661 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
10662 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
10663
10664 <p>I found
10665 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
10666 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
10667 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
10668 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
10669 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
10670 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
10671
10672 <pre>
10673 #!/bin/sh
10674
10675 # Based on
10676 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
10677
10678 set -e
10679 set -x
10680
10681 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
10682     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
10683     exit 1
10684 else
10685     host="$1"
10686 fi
10687
10688 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
10689     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
10690     exit 1
10691 fi
10692
10693 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
10694 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10695 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10696 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
10697
10698 img=$host.img
10699 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
10700 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
10701
10702 parted $img mklabel msdos
10703 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
10704 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
10705 parted $img set 1 boot on
10706
10707 modprobe dm-mod
10708 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
10709 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
10710
10711 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
10712 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
10713 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
10714
10715 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
10716 losetup -d /dev/loop0
10717 </pre>
10718
10719 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
10720 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
10721
10722 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
10723 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
10724 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
10725 seem to work just fine.</p>
10726
10727       </div>
10728       <div class="tags">
10729
10730
10731         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10732
10733
10734       </div>
10735     </div>
10736     <div class="padding"></div>
10737
10738     <div class="entry">
10739       <div class="title">
10740         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
10741       </div>
10742       <div class="date">
10743         20th November 2010
10744       </div>
10745       <div class="body">
10746         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
10747 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
10748 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
10749 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
10750
10751 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
10752 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
10753 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
10754
10755 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
10756
10757 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10758
10759 <blockquote><p>
10760   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
10761   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
10762   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
10763   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
10764   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
10765   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
10766   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
10767   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
10768   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
10769   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
10770   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10771   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10772   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
10773   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
10774   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
10775   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
10776   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10777   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
10778   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10779   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
10780   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
10781   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10782   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
10783   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
10784   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
10785   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10786   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10787   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
10788   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10789   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
10790   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
10791   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
10792   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
10793   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
10794   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
10795   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
10796   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
10797   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
10798   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
10799   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
10800   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
10801   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
10802   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
10803   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
10804   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
10805   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
10806   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
10807   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
10808   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
10809   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
10810   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
10811   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
10812   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10813   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
10814   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
10815   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
10816   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
10817   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
10818   zip
10819 </p></blockquote>
10820
10821 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
10822
10823 <blockquote><p>
10824   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
10825   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
10826   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
10827   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
10828   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
10829   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
10830   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
10831   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
10832   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
10833   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
10834   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
10835   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
10836   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
10837   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
10838   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10839   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
10840   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10841   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
10842   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
10843   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
10844   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
10845   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
10846   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
10847   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
10848   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
10849   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
10850   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
10851   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
10852   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
10853 </p></blockquote>
10854
10855 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10856
10857 <blockquote><p>
10858   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10859 </p></blockquote>
10860
10861 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10862
10863 <blockquote><p>
10864 [nothing]
10865 </p></blockquote>
10866
10867 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10868
10869 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10870
10871 <blockquote><p>
10872   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
10873   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
10874   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
10875   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
10876   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
10877   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
10878   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
10879   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
10880   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
10881   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
10882   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
10883   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
10884   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
10885   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
10886   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
10887   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
10888   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
10889   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
10890   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
10891   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
10892   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
10893   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
10894   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
10895   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
10896   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
10897   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
10898   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
10899   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
10900   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
10901   ttf-sazanami-gothic
10902 </p></blockquote>
10903
10904 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10905
10906 <blockquote><p>
10907   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
10908   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
10909   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
10910   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
10911   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
10912   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
10913   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
10914   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
10915   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
10916   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
10917   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
10918   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
10919   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
10920   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
10921   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
10922   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
10923   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
10924   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
10925   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
10926   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
10927   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10928   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
10929   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
10930   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
10931   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
10932   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
10933   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
10934   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
10935   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
10936   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
10937   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
10938   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
10939   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
10940 </p></blockquote>
10941
10942 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10943
10944 <blockquote><p>
10945   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
10946   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
10947   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
10948   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
10949   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10950   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
10951   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10952 </p></blockquote>
10953
10954 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10955
10956 <blockquote><p>
10957   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
10958 </p></blockquote>
10959
10960       </div>
10961       <div class="tags">
10962
10963
10964         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10965
10966
10967       </div>
10968     </div>
10969     <div class="padding"></div>
10970
10971     <div class="entry">
10972       <div class="title">
10973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
10974       </div>
10975       <div class="date">
10976         20th November 2010
10977       </div>
10978       <div class="body">
10979         <p>Answering
10980 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
10981 call from the Gnash project</a> for
10982 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
10983 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
10984 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
10985 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
10986 releases out more often.</p>
10987
10988 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
10989 I have considered setting up a <a
10990 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
10991 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
10992 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
10993 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
10994 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
10995 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
10996 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
10997 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
10998 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
10999 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
11000 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
11001 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
11002
11003       </div>
11004       <div class="tags">
11005
11006
11007         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11008
11009
11010       </div>
11011     </div>
11012     <div class="padding"></div>
11013
11014     <div class="entry">
11015       <div class="title">
11016         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
11017       </div>
11018       <div class="date">
11019          9th November 2010
11020       </div>
11021       <div class="body">
11022         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
11023
11024 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
11025 3D linked in from
11026 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
11027 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
11028
11029       </div>
11030       <div class="tags">
11031
11032
11033         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11034
11035
11036       </div>
11037     </div>
11038     <div class="padding"></div>
11039
11040     <div class="entry">
11041       <div class="title">
11042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
11043       </div>
11044       <div class="date">
11045         24th October 2010
11046       </div>
11047       <div class="body">
11048         <p>Some updates.</p>
11049
11050 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
11051 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
11052 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
11053 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
11054 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
11055 :)</p>
11056
11057 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
11058 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
11059 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
11060 It is called
11061 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
11062 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
11063 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
11064 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
11065 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
11066 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
11067
11068 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
11069 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
11070 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
11071 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
11072 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
11073 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
11074 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
11075 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
11076 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
11077 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
11078
11079       </div>
11080       <div class="tags">
11081
11082
11083         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
11084
11085
11086       </div>
11087     </div>
11088     <div class="padding"></div>
11089
11090     <div class="entry">
11091       <div class="title">
11092         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
11093       </div>
11094       <div class="date">
11095          4th September 2010
11096       </div>
11097       <div class="body">
11098         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
11099 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
11100 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
11101 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
11102 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
11103 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
11104 installed.</p>
11105
11106 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
11107 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
11108 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
11109 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
11110 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
11111 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
11112 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
11113 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
11114 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
11115
11116 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
11117 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
11118 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
11119 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
11120 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
11121 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
11122 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
11123 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
11124 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
11125 pages they want to visit.</p>
11126
11127 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
11128 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
11129 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
11130 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
11131 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
11132 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
11133 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
11134 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
11135 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
11136 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
11137 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
11138
11139       </div>
11140       <div class="tags">
11141
11142
11143         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11144
11145
11146       </div>
11147     </div>
11148     <div class="padding"></div>
11149
11150     <div class="entry">
11151       <div class="title">
11152         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
11153       </div>
11154       <div class="date">
11155         27th July 2010
11156       </div>
11157       <div class="body">
11158         <p>I discovered this while doing
11159 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
11160 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
11161 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
11162 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
11163 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
11164
11165 <p>An example is from todays
11166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
11167 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
11168 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
11169 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
11170 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
11171 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
11172 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
11173
11174 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
11175
11176 <blockquote><pre>
11177 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
11178  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
11179   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
11180 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
11181  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
11182 </pre></blockquote>
11183
11184 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
11185 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
11186 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
11187 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
11188 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
11189 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
11190 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
11191 of dependency loops.</p>
11192
11193 <p>Thanks to
11194 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
11195 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
11196 dependencies
11197 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
11198 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
11199
11200 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
11201 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
11202 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
11203 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
11204 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
11205 it.</p>
11206
11207       </div>
11208       <div class="tags">
11209
11210
11211         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11212
11213
11214       </div>
11215     </div>
11216     <div class="padding"></div>
11217
11218     <div class="entry">
11219       <div class="title">
11220         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
11221       </div>
11222       <div class="date">
11223         17th July 2010
11224       </div>
11225       <div class="body">
11226         <p>This is a
11227 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
11228 on my
11229 <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
11230 work</a> on
11231 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
11232 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
11233
11234 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
11235 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
11236 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
11237 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
11238
11239 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
11240 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
11241 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
11242
11243 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
11244
11245 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
11246 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
11247 the web.
11248
11249 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
11250 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
11251 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
11252 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
11253 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
11254 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
11255
11256 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
11257 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
11258 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
11259 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
11260 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
11261 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
11262 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
11263 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
11264 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
11265 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
11266 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
11267 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
11268 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
11269 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
11270 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
11271 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
11272
11273 <blockquote><pre>
11274 ldapsearch -h ldap \
11275   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
11276   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
11277   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
11278   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
11279   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
11280   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
11281
11282 ldapsearch -h ldap \
11283   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
11284   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
11285   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
11286   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
11287   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
11288 </pre></blockquote>
11289
11290 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
11291 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
11292 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
11293 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11294 also exist.</p>
11295
11296 <blockquote><pre>
11297 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11298 objectclass: top
11299 objectclass: dnsdomain
11300 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11301 dc: tjener
11302 arecord: 10.0.2.2
11303 associateddomain: tjener.intern
11304
11305 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11306 objectclass: top
11307 objectclass: dnsdomain2
11308 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11309 dc: 2
11310 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
11311 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
11312 </pre></blockquote>
11313
11314 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
11315 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
11316 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
11317 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
11318 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
11319 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
11320 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
11321 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
11322 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
11323 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
11324 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
11325 instead.</p>
11326
11327 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
11328 like this:</p>
11329
11330 <blockquote><pre>
11331 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
11332   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
11333   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
11334   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
11335   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
11336   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
11337
11338 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
11339   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
11340 </pre></blockquote>
11341
11342 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
11343 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
11344 reverse lookups.</p>
11345
11346 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
11347 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
11348 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
11349 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
11350
11351 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
11352 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
11353 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
11354
11355 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
11356 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
11357 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
11358 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
11359 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
11360
11361 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
11362 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
11363 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
11364 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
11365 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
11366
11367 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
11368 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
11369 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
11370 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
11371 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
11372 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
11373
11374 <blockquote><pre>
11375 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
11376     SUP top
11377     AUXILIARY
11378     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
11379           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
11380           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
11381           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
11382           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
11383     ))
11384 </pre></blockquote>
11385
11386 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
11387 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
11388 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
11389 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
11390 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
11391 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
11392
11393 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
11394
11395 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
11396 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
11397 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
11398 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
11399 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
11400
11401 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
11402 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
11403 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
11404 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
11405
11406 <blockquote><pre>
11407 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
11408 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
11409 </pre></blockquote>
11410
11411 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
11412 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
11413 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
11414 search result is this entry:</p>
11415
11416 <blockquote><pre>
11417 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11418 cn: dhcp
11419 objectClass: top
11420 objectClass: dhcpServer
11421 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11422 </pre></blockquote>
11423
11424 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
11425 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
11426 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
11427 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
11428 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
11429 The search result is this entry:</p>
11430
11431 <blockquote><pre>
11432 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11433 cn: DHCP Config
11434 objectClass: top
11435 objectClass: dhcpService
11436 objectClass: dhcpOptions
11437 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11438 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
11439 dhcpStatements: authoritative
11440 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
11441 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
11442 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
11443 </pre></blockquote>
11444
11445 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
11446 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
11447 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
11448 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
11449 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
11450 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
11451 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
11452 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
11453 related computer objects.</p>
11454
11455 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
11456 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
11457 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
11458 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
11459 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
11460 like:</p>
11461
11462 <blockquote><pre>
11463 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11464 cn: hostname
11465 objectClass: top
11466 objectClass: dhcpHost
11467 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11468 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
11469 </pre></blockquote>
11470
11471 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
11472 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
11473 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
11474 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
11475 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
11476 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
11477 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
11478 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
11479 structural object class.
11480
11481 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
11482
11483 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
11484 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
11485 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
11486 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
11487 in the configuration.</p>
11488
11489 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
11490 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
11491 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
11492 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
11493 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
11494 structure.</p>
11495
11496 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
11497 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
11498
11499 <blockquote><pre>
11500 ou=services
11501   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
11502     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
11503     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11504       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11505         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11506     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11507       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11508         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11509     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
11510       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
11511 </pre></blockquote>
11512
11513 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
11514 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
11515 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
11516 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
11517
11518 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
11519 like this:</p>
11520
11521 <blockquote><pre>
11522 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11523 dc: hostname
11524 objectClass: top
11525 objectClass: dhcpHost
11526 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11527 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
11528 associateddomain: hostname.intern
11529 arecord: 10.11.12.13
11530 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11531 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
11532 </pre></blockquote>
11533
11534 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
11535 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
11536 auxiliary object class.</p>
11537
11538       </div>
11539       <div class="tags">
11540
11541
11542         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11543
11544
11545       </div>
11546     </div>
11547     <div class="padding"></div>
11548
11549     <div class="entry">
11550       <div class="title">
11551         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
11552       </div>
11553       <div class="date">
11554         14th July 2010
11555       </div>
11556       <div class="body">
11557         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
11558 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
11559 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
11560 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
11561 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
11562
11563 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
11564 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
11565
11566 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
11567 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
11568 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
11569 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
11570 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
11571 to a slave DNS server.</p>
11572
11573 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
11574 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
11575 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
11576 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
11577 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
11578 seem to work.</p>
11579
11580 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
11581 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
11582 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
11583 this:</p>
11584
11585 <blockquote><pre>
11586   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11587   cn: hostname
11588   objectClass: dhcphost
11589   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11590   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
11591   associateddomain: hostname.intern
11592   arecord: 10.11.12.13
11593   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11594   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
11595   ldapconfigsound: Y
11596 </pre></blockquote>
11597
11598 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
11599 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
11600 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
11601 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
11602
11603 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
11604 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
11605 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
11606 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
11607 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
11608 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
11609 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
11610 might be a good place to put it.</p>
11611
11612 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11613 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11614
11615       </div>
11616       <div class="tags">
11617
11618
11619         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11620
11621
11622       </div>
11623     </div>
11624     <div class="padding"></div>
11625
11626     <div class="entry">
11627       <div class="title">
11628         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
11629       </div>
11630       <div class="date">
11631         11th July 2010
11632       </div>
11633       <div class="body">
11634         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
11635 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
11636 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
11637 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
11638
11639 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
11640 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
11641 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
11642 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
11643 LTSP clients.</p>
11644
11645 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
11646 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
11647 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
11648
11649 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
11650 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
11651 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
11652
11653 <blockquote><pre>
11654 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
11655 #
11656 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
11657 #
11658 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
11659 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
11660 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
11661 #
11662 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
11663 # existence of attribute names.
11664 #
11665 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
11666 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
11667 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
11668 #
11669 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
11670 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
11671 #
11672 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
11673 #     SUP top
11674 #     AUXILIARY
11675 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
11676
11677 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
11678 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
11679     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
11680     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
11681         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
11682         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
11683             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
11684             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
11685             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
11686             # bass value on to clients
11687             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
11688         done
11689     done
11690 fi
11691 </pre></blockquote>
11692
11693 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
11694 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
11695 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
11696 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
11697 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
11698
11699 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11700 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11701
11702 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
11703 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
11704 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
11705 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
11706 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
11707 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
11708
11709       </div>
11710       <div class="tags">
11711
11712
11713         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11714
11715
11716       </div>
11717     </div>
11718     <div class="padding"></div>
11719
11720     <div class="entry">
11721       <div class="title">
11722         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11723       </div>
11724       <div class="date">
11725          9th July 2010
11726       </div>
11727       <div class="body">
11728         <p>Since
11729 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
11730 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
11731 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
11732 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
11733 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
11734 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
11735 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
11736 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
11737 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
11738 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
11739 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
11740 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
11741 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
11742
11743       </div>
11744       <div class="tags">
11745
11746
11747         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11748
11749
11750       </div>
11751     </div>
11752     <div class="padding"></div>
11753
11754     <div class="entry">
11755       <div class="title">
11756         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
11757       </div>
11758       <div class="date">
11759          3rd July 2010
11760       </div>
11761       <div class="body">
11762         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
11763 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
11764 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
11765 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
11766 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
11767 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
11768 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
11769 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
11770
11771 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
11772 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
11773 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
11774 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
11775 publish the difference.</p>
11776
11777 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
11778
11779 <blockquote><p>
11780   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
11781   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
11782   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
11783   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
11784   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
11785   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
11786   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
11787   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
11788 </p></blockquote>
11789
11790 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
11791
11792 <blockquote><p>
11793   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
11794   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
11795   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
11796   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
11797   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
11798   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
11799   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
11800   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
11801   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
11802   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
11803   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
11804   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
11805   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
11806   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
11807   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
11808   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
11809   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
11810   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
11811   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
11812   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
11813 </p></blockquote>
11814
11815 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
11816
11817 <blockquote><p>
11818   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
11819   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
11820   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11821   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11822   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
11823   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
11824   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
11825   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11826   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11827   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11828   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11829   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
11830   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
11831   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
11832   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
11833   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
11834   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
11835   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
11836   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
11837   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
11838   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
11839 </p></blockquote>
11840
11841 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
11842
11843 <blockquote><p>
11844   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
11845   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
11846   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
11847 </p></blockquote>
11848
11849 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
11850 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
11851 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
11852 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
11853 the difference somewhat.
11854
11855       </div>
11856       <div class="tags">
11857
11858
11859         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11860
11861
11862       </div>
11863     </div>
11864     <div class="padding"></div>
11865
11866     <div class="entry">
11867       <div class="title">
11868         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11869       </div>
11870       <div class="date">
11871         28th June 2010
11872       </div>
11873       <div class="body">
11874         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
11875 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
11876 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
11877 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
11878 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
11879 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
11880 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
11881 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
11882 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
11883 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
11884
11885 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
11886 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
11887 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
11888 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
11889 released.</p>
11890
11891 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
11892 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
11893 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
11894 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
11895
11896 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
11897 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11898
11899 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
11900 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
11901 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
11902 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
11903 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
11904
11905       </div>
11906       <div class="tags">
11907
11908
11909         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11910
11911
11912       </div>
11913     </div>
11914     <div class="padding"></div>
11915
11916     <div class="entry">
11917       <div class="title">
11918         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
11919       </div>
11920       <div class="date">
11921         24th June 2010
11922       </div>
11923       <div class="body">
11924         <p>A while back, I
11925 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
11926 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
11927 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
11928 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
11929
11930 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
11931 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
11932 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
11933 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
11934
11935 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
11936 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
11937 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
11938 Debian Edu.</p>
11939
11940 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
11941 the
11942 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
11943 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
11944 available today from IETF.</p>
11945
11946 <pre>
11947 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
11948 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
11949 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
11950  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
11951         NAME 'dhcpHost'
11952         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
11953 -       SUP top
11954 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
11955         MUST cn
11956         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
11957         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
11958 </pre>
11959
11960 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
11961 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
11962 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
11963
11964 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11965 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11966
11967       </div>
11968       <div class="tags">
11969
11970
11971         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11972
11973
11974       </div>
11975     </div>
11976     <div class="padding"></div>
11977
11978     <div class="entry">
11979       <div class="title">
11980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
11981       </div>
11982       <div class="date">
11983         16th June 2010
11984       </div>
11985       <div class="body">
11986         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
11987 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
11988 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
11989 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
11990 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
11991 this:
11992
11993 <blockquote><pre>
11994 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11995 tasksel --new-install
11996 </pre></blockquote>
11997
11998 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
11999 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
12000 any output what so ever.
12001
12002 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
12003 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
12004 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
12005 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
12006 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
12007 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
12008 code like this:
12009
12010 <blockquote><pre>
12011 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
12012 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
12013 $cmd
12014 </pre></blockquote>
12015
12016 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
12017 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
12018 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
12019 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
12020 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
12021 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
12022 installation.</p>
12023
12024 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
12025 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
12026 like this.</p>
12027
12028       </div>
12029       <div class="tags">
12030
12031
12032         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12033
12034
12035       </div>
12036     </div>
12037     <div class="padding"></div>
12038
12039     <div class="entry">
12040       <div class="title">
12041         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
12042       </div>
12043       <div class="date">
12044         13th June 2010
12045       </div>
12046       <div class="body">
12047         <p>My
12048 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
12049 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
12050 finally made the upgrade logs available from
12051 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
12052 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
12053 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
12054 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
12055
12056 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
12057 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
12058 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
12059 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
12060 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
12061 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
12062 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
12063 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
12064
12065 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
12066 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
12067 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
12068 too surprising.</p>
12069
12070 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
12071 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
12072 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
12073 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
12074 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
12075 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
12076 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
12077 continue.</p>
12078
12079 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
12080 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
12081   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
12082   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
12083   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
12084   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
12085   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
12086   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
12087   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
12088   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
12089   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
12090   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
12091   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
12092   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
12093   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
12094   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12095   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
12096   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
12097   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
12098   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
12099   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
12100   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
12101   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
12102   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
12103   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
12104   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
12105   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
12106   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
12107   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
12108   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
12109
12110 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
12111
12112 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
12113   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
12114   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
12115   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
12116   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
12117   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
12118   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
12119   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
12120   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
12121   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
12122   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
12123   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
12124   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
12125   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
12126   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
12127   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
12128   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
12129   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
12130   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
12131   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
12132   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
12133   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
12134   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
12135   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
12136   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
12137   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
12138   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
12139   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
12140   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
12141   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12142   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
12143   zip</p>
12144
12145 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
12146
12147 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
12148   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
12149   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
12150   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
12151   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
12152   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
12153   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
12154   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
12155   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
12156   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
12157   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
12158   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
12159   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
12160   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
12161   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12162   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
12163   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
12164   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
12165   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
12166   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
12167   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
12168   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
12169   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
12170   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
12171   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
12172   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
12173   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
12174   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
12175
12176 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
12177 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
12178   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
12179   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
12180   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
12181   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
12182   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
12183   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
12184   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
12185   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
12186   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
12187   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
12188   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
12189   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
12190   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
12191   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
12192   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
12193   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
12194   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
12195   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
12196   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
12197   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
12198   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
12199   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
12200   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
12201   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
12202   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
12203   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
12204   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
12205   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
12206   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
12207   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
12208   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
12209   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
12210   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
12211   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12212   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
12213   xulrunner-1.9</p>
12214
12215
12216       </div>
12217       <div class="tags">
12218
12219
12220         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12221
12222
12223       </div>
12224     </div>
12225     <div class="padding"></div>
12226
12227     <div class="entry">
12228       <div class="title">
12229         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
12230       </div>
12231       <div class="date">
12232         11th June 2010
12233       </div>
12234       <div class="body">
12235         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
12236 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
12237 have been discovered and reported in the process
12238 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
12239 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
12240 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
12241 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
12242 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
12243
12244 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
12245 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
12246 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
12247 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
12248 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
12249 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
12250
12251 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
12252 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
12253 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
12254 is created.  The bug report
12255 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
12256 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
12257 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
12258 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
12259 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
12260 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
12261 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
12262 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
12263 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
12264 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
12265 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
12266 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
12267 Debian Squeeze.</p>
12268
12269 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
12270 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
12271 trick:</p>
12272
12273 <blockquote><pre>
12274 #!/bin/sh
12275 set -ex
12276
12277 if [ "$1" ] ; then
12278     desktop=$1
12279 else
12280     desktop=gnome
12281 fi
12282
12283 from=lenny
12284 to=squeeze
12285
12286 exec &lt; /dev/null
12287 unset LANG
12288 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
12289 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
12290 fuser -mv .
12291 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
12292 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
12293 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
12294 #!/bin/sh
12295 exit 101
12296 EOF
12297 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
12298 exit_cleanup() {
12299     umount $tmpdir/proc
12300 }
12301 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
12302 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
12303 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
12304
12305 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
12306
12307 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
12308 # to return the correct answers.
12309 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
12310     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
12311
12312 # Include the desktop and laptop task
12313 for test in desktop laptop ; do
12314     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
12315 #!/bin/sh
12316 exit 2
12317 EOF
12318     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
12319 done
12320
12321 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
12322 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
12323 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
12324 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
12325
12326 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
12327 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
12328 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
12329 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
12330 fuser -mv
12331 </pre></blockquote>
12332
12333 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
12334 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
12335 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
12336 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
12337 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
12338 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
12339
12340 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
12341 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
12342 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
12343 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
12344 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
12345 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
12346 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
12347
12348 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
12349 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
12350 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
12351 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
12352 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
12353 packages.</p>
12354
12355       </div>
12356       <div class="tags">
12357
12358
12359         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12360
12361
12362       </div>
12363     </div>
12364     <div class="padding"></div>
12365
12366     <div class="entry">
12367       <div class="title">
12368         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
12369       </div>
12370       <div class="date">
12371          6th June 2010
12372       </div>
12373       <div class="body">
12374         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
12375 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
12376 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
12377 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
12378 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
12379 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
12380 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
12381
12382 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
12383 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
12384 COLUMNS):</p>
12385
12386 <blockquote><pre>
12387 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
12388 previous=N
12389 PREVLEVEL=
12390 RUNLEVEL=
12391 runlevel=S
12392 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
12393 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
12394 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
12395 </pre></blockquote>
12396
12397 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
12398 script.</p>
12399
12400 <blockquote><pre>
12401 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
12402 previous=N
12403 PREVLEVEL=N
12404 RUNLEVEL=S
12405 runlevel=S
12406 </pre></blockquote>
12407
12408 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
12409 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
12410 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
12411
12412 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
12413 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
12414 choice.</p>
12415
12416       </div>
12417       <div class="tags">
12418
12419
12420         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12421
12422
12423       </div>
12424     </div>
12425     <div class="padding"></div>
12426
12427     <div class="entry">
12428       <div class="title">
12429         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
12430       </div>
12431       <div class="date">
12432          6th June 2010
12433       </div>
12434       <div class="body">
12435         <p>Via the
12436 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
12437 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
12438 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
12439 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
12440 following the standards wars of today.</p>
12441
12442       </div>
12443       <div class="tags">
12444
12445
12446         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12447
12448
12449       </div>
12450     </div>
12451     <div class="padding"></div>
12452
12453     <div class="entry">
12454       <div class="title">
12455         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
12456       </div>
12457       <div class="date">
12458          3rd June 2010
12459       </div>
12460       <div class="body">
12461         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
12462 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
12463 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
12464 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
12465 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
12466
12467 <blockquote><pre>
12468 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
12469   vendor                    count
12470   Dell Computer Corporation     1
12471     PowerEdge 1750              1
12472   IBM                           1
12473     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
12474   Intel                         2
12475   [no-dmi-info]                 3
12476 maintainer:~#
12477 </pre></blockquote>
12478
12479 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
12480 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
12481 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
12482 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
12483 option to list the individual machines.</p>
12484
12485 <p>A larger list is
12486 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
12487 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
12488 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
12489 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
12490 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
12491 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
12492 collector.</p>
12493
12494       </div>
12495       <div class="tags">
12496
12497
12498         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
12499
12500
12501       </div>
12502     </div>
12503     <div class="padding"></div>
12504
12505     <div class="entry">
12506       <div class="title">
12507         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
12508       </div>
12509       <div class="date">
12510          1st June 2010
12511       </div>
12512       <div class="body">
12513         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
12514 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
12515 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
12516 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
12517 wait.</p>
12518
12519 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
12520 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
12521 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
12522 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
12523 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
12524 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
12525
12526 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
12527 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
12528 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
12529 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
12530 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
12531 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
12532 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
12533 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
12534
12535 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
12536
12537       </div>
12538       <div class="tags">
12539
12540
12541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12542
12543
12544       </div>
12545     </div>
12546     <div class="padding"></div>
12547
12548     <div class="entry">
12549       <div class="title">
12550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
12551       </div>
12552       <div class="date">
12553         27th May 2010
12554       </div>
12555       <div class="body">
12556         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
12557 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
12558 issues are known and should be solved:
12559
12560 <p><ul>
12561
12562 <li>The wicd package seen to
12563 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
12564 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
12565 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
12566 seem to be on the case.</li>
12567
12568 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
12569 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
12570 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
12571 maintainer is on the case.</li>
12572
12573 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
12574 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
12575 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
12576 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
12577 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
12578 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
12579 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
12580 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
12581
12582 </ul></p>
12583
12584 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
12585 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
12586 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
12587 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
12588
12589 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12590 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12591 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12592 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12593
12594 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
12595
12596       </div>
12597       <div class="tags">
12598
12599
12600         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12601
12602
12603       </div>
12604     </div>
12605     <div class="padding"></div>
12606
12607     <div class="entry">
12608       <div class="title">
12609         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
12610       </div>
12611       <div class="date">
12612         22nd May 2010
12613       </div>
12614       <div class="body">
12615         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
12616 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
12617 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
12618 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
12619
12620 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
12621 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
12622 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
12623 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
12624 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
12625 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
12626 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
12627 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
12628 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
12629 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
12630 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
12631 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
12632 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
12633 going to work.</p>
12634
12635 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
12636 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
12637 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
12638 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
12639 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
12640 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
12641 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
12642 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
12643 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
12644 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
12645 Edu.</p>
12646
12647 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
12648 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
12649 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
12650 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
12651 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
12652 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
12653
12654 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
12655 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
12656
12657       </div>
12658       <div class="tags">
12659
12660
12661         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12662
12663
12664       </div>
12665     </div>
12666     <div class="padding"></div>
12667
12668     <div class="entry">
12669       <div class="title">
12670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
12671       </div>
12672       <div class="date">
12673         14th May 2010
12674       </div>
12675       <div class="body">
12676         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
12677 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
12678 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
12679 expected, if I am to believe the
12680 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12681 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
12682 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
12683 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
12684 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
12685 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
12686 version.</p>
12687
12688 More information about
12689 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12690 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
12691 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
12692 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12693
12694 <blockquote><pre>
12695 CONCURRENCY=none
12696 </pre></blockquote>
12697
12698 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12699 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12700 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12701 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12702
12703       </div>
12704       <div class="tags">
12705
12706
12707         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12708
12709
12710       </div>
12711     </div>
12712     <div class="padding"></div>
12713
12714     <div class="entry">
12715       <div class="title">
12716         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
12717       </div>
12718       <div class="date">
12719         14th May 2010
12720       </div>
12721       <div class="body">
12722         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
12723 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
12724 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
12725 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
12726 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
12727 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
12728 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
12729 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
12730
12731 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
12732 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
12733 this on the collector host:</p>
12734
12735 <blockquote><pre>
12736 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
12737 </pre></blockquote>
12738
12739 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
12740 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
12741
12742 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
12743 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
12744 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
12745 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
12746 written yet.</p>
12747
12748       </div>
12749       <div class="tags">
12750
12751
12752         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
12753
12754
12755       </div>
12756     </div>
12757     <div class="padding"></div>
12758
12759     <div class="entry">
12760       <div class="title">
12761         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
12762       </div>
12763       <div class="date">
12764         13th May 2010
12765       </div>
12766       <div class="body">
12767         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
12768 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
12769 has been
12770 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
12771
12772 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
12773 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
12774 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
12775 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
12776 based boot system.  Tollef is
12777 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
12778 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
12779 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
12780 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
12781 at the moment do not.</p>
12782
12783 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
12784 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
12785 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
12786 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
12787 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
12788 way forward.</p>
12789
12790 <p>In the mean time, based on the
12791 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12792 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
12793 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
12794 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
12795 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
12796 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
12797 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
12798 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
12799
12800       </div>
12801       <div class="tags">
12802
12803
12804         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12805
12806
12807       </div>
12808     </div>
12809     <div class="padding"></div>
12810
12811     <div class="entry">
12812       <div class="title">
12813         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
12814       </div>
12815       <div class="date">
12816          6th May 2010
12817       </div>
12818       <div class="body">
12819         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
12820 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
12821 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
12822 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
12823 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12824 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
12825 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12826
12827 <blockquote><pre>
12828 CONCURRENCY=makefile
12829 </pre></blockquote>
12830
12831 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
12832 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
12833 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
12834 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
12835 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
12836 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
12837 make this happen.</p>
12838
12839 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
12840 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
12841 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
12842 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
12843 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
12844
12845 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
12846 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
12847 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
12848 fix the remaining issues.</p>
12849
12850 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12851 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12852 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12853 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12854
12855       </div>
12856       <div class="tags">
12857
12858
12859         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12860
12861
12862       </div>
12863     </div>
12864     <div class="padding"></div>
12865
12866     <div class="entry">
12867       <div class="title">
12868         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
12869       </div>
12870       <div class="date">
12871         27th July 2009
12872       </div>
12873       <div class="body">
12874         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
12875 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
12876 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
12877 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
12878 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
12879 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
12880 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
12881
12882 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
12883 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
12884 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
12885
12886       </div>
12887       <div class="tags">
12888
12889
12890         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12891
12892
12893       </div>
12894     </div>
12895     <div class="padding"></div>
12896
12897     <div class="entry">
12898       <div class="title">
12899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
12900       </div>
12901       <div class="date">
12902         22nd July 2009
12903       </div>
12904       <div class="body">
12905         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
12906 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
12907 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
12908 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
12909 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
12910 the package up to date.</p>
12911
12912 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
12913 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
12914 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
12915 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
12916 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
12917 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
12918 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
12919 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
12920 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
12921 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
12922 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
12923 working on the future release.</p>
12924
12925 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
12926 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
12927
12928       </div>
12929       <div class="tags">
12930
12931
12932         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12933
12934
12935       </div>
12936     </div>
12937     <div class="padding"></div>
12938
12939     <div class="entry">
12940       <div class="title">
12941         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
12942       </div>
12943       <div class="date">
12944         24th June 2009
12945       </div>
12946       <div class="body">
12947         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
12948 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
12949 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
12950 funded
12951 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
12952 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
12953 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
12954 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
12955 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
12956 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
12957
12958 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
12959 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
12960 boot:</p>
12961
12962 <ul>
12963
12964 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
12965
12966 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
12967    clock is in UTC.</li>
12968
12969 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
12970    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12971    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
12972
12973 </ul>
12974
12975 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
12976 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
12977 Villegas</a>.
12978
12979 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
12980 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
12981 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
12982 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
12983 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
12984 using this.</p>
12985
12986 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
12987 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
12988 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
12989 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
12990 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
12991 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
12992 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
12993
12994       </div>
12995       <div class="tags">
12996
12997
12998         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12999
13000
13001       </div>
13002     </div>
13003     <div class="padding"></div>
13004
13005     <div class="entry">
13006       <div class="title">
13007         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
13008       </div>
13009       <div class="date">
13010         17th May 2009
13011       </div>
13012       <div class="body">
13013         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
13014 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
13015 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
13016 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
13017 dager siden kom
13018 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
13019 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
13020 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
13021 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
13022 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
13023
13024 <blockquote>
13025 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
13026 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
13027 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
13028 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
13029 </blockquote>
13030
13031 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
13032 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
13033 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
13034 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
13035 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
13036
13037 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
13038 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
13039 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
13040
13041       </div>
13042       <div class="tags">
13043
13044
13045         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
13046
13047
13048       </div>
13049     </div>
13050     <div class="padding"></div>
13051
13052     <div class="entry">
13053       <div class="title">
13054         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
13055       </div>
13056       <div class="date">
13057          7th May 2009
13058       </div>
13059       <div class="body">
13060         <p>Kom over
13061 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
13062 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
13063 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
13064 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
13065 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
13066 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
13067 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
13068
13069       </div>
13070       <div class="tags">
13071
13072
13073         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13074
13075
13076       </div>
13077     </div>
13078     <div class="padding"></div>
13079
13080     <div class="entry">
13081       <div class="title">
13082         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
13083       </div>
13084       <div class="date">
13085          2nd May 2009
13086       </div>
13087       <div class="body">
13088         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
13089 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
13090 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
13091 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
13092 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
13093 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
13094 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
13095 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
13096 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
13097 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
13098 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
13099 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
13100 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
13101 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
13102 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
13103 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
13104 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
13105 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
13106 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
13107 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
13108
13109 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
13110 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
13111 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
13112 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
13113 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
13114 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
13115 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
13116 betydelige.</p>
13117
13118       </div>
13119       <div class="tags">
13120
13121
13122         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13123
13124
13125       </div>
13126     </div>
13127     <div class="padding"></div>
13128
13129     <div class="entry">
13130       <div class="title">
13131         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
13132       </div>
13133       <div class="date">
13134          2nd May 2009
13135       </div>
13136       <div class="body">
13137         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
13138 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
13139 do not yet know them.</p>
13140
13141 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
13142 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
13143 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
13144 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
13145 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
13146 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
13147 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
13148 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
13149 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
13150 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
13151 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
13152
13153 <p>The second one is
13154 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
13155 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
13156 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
13157 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
13158 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
13159 and the company behind it is running
13160 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
13161 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
13162 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
13163 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
13164 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
13165 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
13166 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
13167 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
13168
13169 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
13170 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
13171 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
13172 surrounded by today.</p>
13173
13174       </div>
13175       <div class="tags">
13176
13177
13178         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>.
13179
13180
13181       </div>
13182     </div>
13183     <div class="padding"></div>
13184
13185     <div class="entry">
13186       <div class="title">
13187         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
13188       </div>
13189       <div class="date">
13190         28th April 2009
13191       </div>
13192       <div class="body">
13193         <p>Julien Blache
13194 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
13195 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
13196 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
13197 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
13198 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
13199 properties.</p>
13200
13201       </div>
13202       <div class="tags">
13203
13204
13205         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13206
13207
13208       </div>
13209     </div>
13210     <div class="padding"></div>
13211
13212     <div class="entry">
13213       <div class="title">
13214         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
13215       </div>
13216       <div class="date">
13217         30th March 2009
13218       </div>
13219       <div class="body">
13220         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
13221 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
13222 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
13223 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
13224 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
13225 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
13226 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
13227 application.</p>
13228
13229 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
13230 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
13231 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
13232 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
13233 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
13234 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
13235 blocked from doing so.</p>
13236
13237 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
13238 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
13239 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
13240 requirements change.</p>
13241
13242 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
13243 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
13244 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
13245
13246       </div>
13247       <div class="tags">
13248
13249
13250         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
13251
13252
13253       </div>
13254     </div>
13255     <div class="padding"></div>
13256
13257     <div class="entry">
13258       <div class="title">
13259         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
13260       </div>
13261       <div class="date">
13262         29th March 2009
13263       </div>
13264       <div class="body">
13265         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
13266 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
13267 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
13268 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
13269 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
13270 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
13271 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
13272 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
13273 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
13274 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
13275 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
13276 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
13277 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
13278 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
13279 now. :)</p>
13280
13281       </div>
13282       <div class="tags">
13283
13284
13285         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13286
13287
13288       </div>
13289     </div>
13290     <div class="padding"></div>
13291
13292     <div class="entry">
13293       <div class="title">
13294         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
13295       </div>
13296       <div class="date">
13297         29th March 2009
13298       </div>
13299       <div class="body">
13300         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
13301 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
13302 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
13303 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
13304 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
13305 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
13306
13307 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
13308 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
13309 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
13310 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
13311 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
13312 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
13313 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
13314 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
13315 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
13316 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
13317 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
13318 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
13319 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
13320
13321 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
13322 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
13323 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
13324 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
13325
13326 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
13327 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
13328
13329 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
13330 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
13331 new IETF work group?</p>
13332
13333       </div>
13334       <div class="tags">
13335
13336
13337         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13338
13339
13340       </div>
13341     </div>
13342     <div class="padding"></div>
13343
13344     <div class="entry">
13345       <div class="title">
13346         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
13347       </div>
13348       <div class="date">
13349         15th February 2009
13350       </div>
13351       <div class="body">
13352         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
13353 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
13354 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
13355 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
13356 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
13357 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
13358 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
13359 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
13360 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
13361 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
13362 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
13363 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
13364
13365       </div>
13366       <div class="tags">
13367
13368
13369         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
13370
13371
13372       </div>
13373     </div>
13374     <div class="padding"></div>
13375
13376     <div class="entry">
13377       <div class="title">
13378         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
13379       </div>
13380       <div class="date">
13381          7th December 2008
13382       </div>
13383       <div class="body">
13384         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
13385 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
13386 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
13387 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
13388 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
13389 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
13390 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
13391 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
13392
13393 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
13394 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
13395 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
13396 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
13397 of these cards.</p>
13398
13399       </div>
13400       <div class="tags">
13401
13402
13403         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
13404
13405
13406       </div>
13407     </div>
13408     <div class="padding"></div>
13409
13410     <div class="entry">
13411       <div class="title">
13412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
13413       </div>
13414       <div class="date">
13415         25th November 2008
13416       </div>
13417       <div class="body">
13418         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
13419 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
13420 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
13421 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
13422 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
13423 notes are available on
13424 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
13425 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
13426 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
13427 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
13428 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
13429 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
13430 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
13431 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
13432 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
13433
13434 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
13435 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
13436
13437       </div>
13438       <div class="tags">
13439
13440
13441         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13442
13443
13444       </div>
13445     </div>
13446     <div class="padding"></div>
13447
13448     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
13449     <div id="sidebar">
13450
13451
13452
13453 <h2>Archive</h2>
13454 <ul>
13455
13456 <li>2018
13457 <ul>
13458
13459 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
13460
13461 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
13462
13463 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13464
13465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13466
13467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13468
13469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
13470
13471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13472
13473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/09/">September (3)</a></li>
13474
13475 </ul></li>
13476
13477 <li>2017
13478 <ul>
13479
13480 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
13481
13482 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13483
13484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13485
13486 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
13487
13488 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
13489
13490 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
13491
13492 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
13493
13494 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
13495
13496 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
13497
13498 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13499
13500 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
13501
13502 </ul></li>
13503
13504 <li>2016
13505 <ul>
13506
13507 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
13508
13509 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
13510
13511 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13512
13513 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
13514
13515 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
13516
13517 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13518
13519 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13520
13521 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
13522
13523 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13524
13525 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
13526
13527 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
13528
13529 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13530
13531 </ul></li>
13532
13533 <li>2015
13534 <ul>
13535
13536 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13537
13538 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13539
13540 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
13541
13542 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
13543
13544 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13545
13546 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
13547
13548 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
13549
13550 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13551
13552 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13553
13554 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13555
13556 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
13557
13558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13559
13560 </ul></li>
13561
13562 <li>2014
13563 <ul>
13564
13565 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13566
13567 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13568
13569 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
13570
13571 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13572
13573 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
13574
13575 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13576
13577 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13578
13579 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13580
13581 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13582
13583 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
13584
13585 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13586
13587 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13588
13589 </ul></li>
13590
13591 <li>2013
13592 <ul>
13593
13594 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
13595
13596 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
13597
13598 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
13599
13600 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
13601
13602 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13603
13604 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
13605
13606 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13607
13608 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13609
13610 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13611
13612 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
13613
13614 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
13615
13616 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13617
13618 </ul></li>
13619
13620 <li>2012
13621 <ul>
13622
13623 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13624
13625 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
13626
13627 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
13628
13629 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
13630
13631 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
13632
13633 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
13634
13635 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
13636
13637 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13638
13639 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
13640
13641 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
13642
13643 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
13644
13645 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13646
13647 </ul></li>
13648
13649 <li>2011
13650 <ul>
13651
13652 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
13653
13654 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13655
13656 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
13657
13658 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13659
13660 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13661
13662 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13663
13664 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13665
13666 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13667
13668 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
13669
13670 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13671
13672 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13673
13674 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
13675
13676 </ul></li>
13677
13678 <li>2010
13679 <ul>
13680
13681 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13682
13683 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
13684
13685 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13686
13687 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13688
13689 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13690
13691 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
13692
13693 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
13694
13695 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
13696
13697 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
13698
13699 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13700
13701 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
13702
13703 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
13704
13705 </ul></li>
13706
13707 <li>2009
13708 <ul>
13709
13710 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
13711
13712 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
13713
13714 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
13715
13716 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
13717
13718 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13719
13720 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
13721
13722 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
13723
13724 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13725
13726 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
13727
13728 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13729
13730 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13731
13732 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13733
13734 </ul></li>
13735
13736 <li>2008
13737 <ul>
13738
13739 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
13740
13741 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13742
13743 </ul></li>
13744
13745 </ul>
13746
13747
13748
13749 <h2>Tags</h2>
13750 <ul>
13751
13752  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
13753
13754  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
13755
13756  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
13757
13758  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
13759
13760  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (10)</a></li>
13761
13762  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
13763
13764  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
13765
13766  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
13767
13768  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (162)</a></li>
13769
13770  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
13771
13772  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
13773
13774  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
13775
13776  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
13777
13778  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
13779
13780  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
13781
13782  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (385)</a></li>
13783
13784  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
13785
13786  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
13787
13788  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
13789
13790  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
13791
13792  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
13793
13794  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
13795
13796  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
13797
13798  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
13799
13800  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
13801
13802  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi (3)</a></li>
13803
13804  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
13805
13806  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
13807
13808  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
13809
13810  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
13811
13812  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
13813
13814  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
13815
13816  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (41)</a></li>
13817
13818  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (10)</a></li>
13819
13820  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (299)</a></li>
13821
13822  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
13823
13824  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
13825
13826  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
13827
13828  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (72)</a></li>
13829
13830  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (107)</a></li>
13831
13832  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
13833
13834  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
13835
13836  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
13837
13838  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
13839
13840  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
13841
13842  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
13843
13844  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (6)</a></li>
13845
13846  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
13847
13848  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (54)</a></li>
13849
13850  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
13851
13852  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
13853
13854  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
13855
13856  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
13857
13858  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
13859
13860  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (55)</a></li>
13861
13862  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
13863
13864  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
13865
13866  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
13867
13868  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (12)</a></li>
13869
13870  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (68)</a></li>
13871
13872  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
13873
13874  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (41)</a></li>
13875
13876 </ul>
13877
13878
13879     </div>
13880     <p style="text-align: right">
13881  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
13882 </p>
13883
13884   </body>
13885 </html>